Colour traditional-style tattoo of a cartoon mermaid with flowing red hair, a yellow and blue fish and a red crab among bubbles and seaweed, on an upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon mermaid with fish and crab on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo shows a cartoon mermaid with long flowing red hair that wraps around the design. A yellow and blue fish and a red crab sit among rising bubbles, green seaweed and grey rocks. Bold dark outlines and solid fills dominate, with some shading on the hair and rocks.

Traditional Thigh Mermaid Fish Crab Bubble Seaweed Red hair Cartoon Underwater Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the lane for three days, and by the second night the Lantern Inn held only a man who would not take off his boots and a girl of about seven who had counted the fish painted on the dining room wall twice. My mother ran the bar then. When the fire needed feeding she told the girl the old story, the one her own nan had told her, with the sea in it, though the sea was forty miles off and frozen at the edges.

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Once, she said, a mermaid with hair the colour of a pillar box lived in a cove below the cliffs. Her hair was so long it wound round the grey rocks and held the tide in its place. She had a striped fish for company, a cheerful, nervous creature who swam a length ahead and read the weather in the bubbles, and a red crab with a short temper who wrote rules on limpet shells and nailed them to the kelp.

One winter the bubbles stopped rising. The crab read the sign and pinned up a rule: nobody goes near the surface when the water goes still. The fish, who loved the light more than sense, swam up anyway to see the yellow lamp burning in a window above the waves. The mermaid followed him, unwinding her hair from the rocks, and the tide came in behind her like a door swinging shut.

The crab hauled them both back down by the fins, hair and all, and the tide went out again as if nothing had happened. My mother always stopped there and poked the fire. Next morning the snow had thawed enough to open the lane, and the girl found a red crab shell on the windowsill with a limpet taped to it and a note scratched inside: bubbles first, then breakfast.