Colour tattoo of a cartoon mermaid with flowing red hair and a teal tail on the side of a person's ribs, in a neo-traditional style.

Cartoon mermaid with flowing red hair on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cartoon mermaid sits with her head bowed, her long red hair streaming up and over to the upper left, and a purple top and teal tail. The bold black outlines and smooth colour fills are combined with darker red shading in the hair. The tattoo is centred on the side of the torso with plain skin around it and a strip of white gauze at the top edge.

Neo-trad Ribs Mermaid Red hair Tail Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The net came up heavy on the third haul, and Joe Quayle swore at it the way he swore at everything before breakfast. Then the winch stopped, and nobody on the Kittiwake said a word, because something was tangled in the mesh and it was not cod. Red hair, a great spill of it, fanned across the wet rope and streamed out over the gunwale as if the wind had got into it.

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She sat in the net with her head bowed, a purple shell strapped across her chest and a teal tail curled under the cord. Her eyes were shut. Skipper Hennessy wanted her cut loose and tossed back before the mate could see sense, but Nell Ashdown was already crouching by the stern, working the knots with her bare fingers. "Hold still," she told the mermaid, the way you'd talk to a frightened dog. The hair kept lifting on a breeze nobody else could feel.

It took most of an hour. Nell's palms bled from the cord, and the sun came up over the Wash grey as pewter. When the last loop slid free, the mermaid did not dive. She lifted her head, looked past the crew to the harbour wall, and sang one low note that made the gulls go quiet. The engine coughed, caught, and the Kittiwake limped for port on a following wind it had no right to have.

Back at the quay the net was mended and the hold was light. Nobody ever agreed on what had been caught that morning. Only a single red strand stayed snagged on the cleat, bright as a flare, and it was still there when the tide came in.