Gold metallic mermaid scale temporary tattoos running diagonally from the shoulder down the upper arm of a woman on a rocky beach.

Gold mermaid scales on a shoulder and arm

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A woman with long hair, shown from the shoulder down to the upper arm, wears a diagonal trail of gold metallic scale designs. Each scale is a fan-shaped motif with fine radiating lines and a shimmering finish, and they vary slightly in size and angle. The background is a sunlit rocky shoreline with seaweed and a blue bikini strap, with the face cropped out of frame.

Shoulder Upper arm Scale Gold Beach Seaweed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spring tide had dragged the rocks bare by the time Tamsin Rooke reached the Gullsmere shelf, and she nearly stepped on the first scale before she saw it. It lay on the wet ribs of the limestone like a coin someone had dropped and forgotten, fan-shaped and ridged with lines as fine as hair, and when she crouched it caught the low sun and threw the light back at her.

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She found eleven more before the water turned. They ran in a line towards the sea wall, each a little larger than the last and then a little smaller, as though something had shed them while swimming away and kept changing its mind about where to go. Her grandmother had sold cockles from that same shelf for forty years and never once mentioned gold. Tamsin gathered them into the lining of her coat and told nobody, which was the first mistake.

That night she laid them along her arm on the kitchen table, pressing each one down with a thumb until it stuck, and the room went strange and bright. Out past the harbour light, something answered with a long low note like a bell struck underwater. By morning the scales had lost their shine. They lifted at the edges like old varnish, and by noon only one was left, a small curve over her collarbone that would not come away however hard she scrubbed.

She walked back to the shelf at the next low tide. The pool where she had found them held nothing but weed, and she knelt at its edge and set the last scale on the surface. It turned once, caught the light, and sank into the green, and far out the bell rang again, closer this time, as if someone had heard her and was coming to collect the rest.