Colour tattoo of a cartoon mermaid with red hair and green eyes on the upper arm and shoulder, with a small blue butterfly near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon mermaid with butterfly on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The collage shows a bold-outlined cartoon mermaid with flowing red hair, green eyes and red lips, shown from the face to the waist on the upper arm and shoulder. A small blue butterfly sits near the shoulder, and the figure's hair and arms partly cover her chest. The linework is heavy and black, with flat colour fills and soft shading on the skin tones, and the panels show the same piece from close-up and wider angles.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mermaid had been lifting the ferry timetable off the noticeboard for a week before Nell Pardoe thought to ask what she wanted it for. Nell ran the pasty hatch on Skerrin Quay, and from her window she could see the whole sweep of the harbour wall, where the red-headed woman sat with her tail folded under the green slime of the steps and read the times with one finger, moving her lips the way a child does over a hymn book.

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On the seventh morning Nell slid a pasty along the hatch ledge and said, "It's the Tuesday boat you want. Half past nine, if the wind lets it." The mermaid's green eyes came up slow and bright. "Boats leave every day," she said. "I only ever watch them." Her hair moved on the water like weed on a current, and a small blue butterfly, which had been drying its wings on a mooring rope, lifted off and settled on her bare shoulder as though it had been waiting there all along. Nell had never seen one that wasn't bound to the gorse on the cliffs. "Where'd you get that?" "It's the last of the summer," the mermaid said. "They come off the cliffs in September, and I keep them until someone is ready to go."

Nell thought of her brother Col, who had taken the Tuesday boat nine years back with one suitcase and a promise to write. She had kept the envelope of his unposted letters in the hatch drawer, addressed and stamped, the way you keep a door unlocked. She fished it out now and leaned down to hand it over. The mermaid took it, pressed it flat against her chest, and the butterfly opened its wings.

"Mind the swell at the mouth," Nell said. The mermaid slid backwards off the step with the envelope held high, and when the ferry horn sounded out past the breakwater, a flick of blue went with her, over the water and gone.

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