Colour tattoo of green and blue mermaid tail scales on a lower leg, photographed in a bath with water on the skin.

Green mermaid scale tattoo on a leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid tail made of overlapping green and blue scales, drawn with dark outlines and highlighted with yellow-green edges on each scale. The scales fan out in rows that taper towards the lower right, with a red-pink fin edge at the point. The photo is taken from the foot end of an extended leg in a bath, with water droplets on the skin and a shower fitting and purple sponge in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The net came in heavy again this morning, and I was the one sat on the upturned crate mending it when the Mary Ellen hauled up beside the quay. Dad says I've got my hands in the wrong place, that a net wants patience, not a girl with a bone needle. I told him patience is what the sea uses up.

Among the cod and the torn mesh there was a thing I can't stop turning over. It was caught high on the wing where the bag had split, and it was a scale, or I told myself it was, the size of a saucer, green going blue at the rim and edged in yellow like lemon peel. Each one lay over the next like slates on the chapel roof. Mr Pritchard said it was ray skin, and maybe it was. But at the point it had a flare of red-pink, thin as a vein, and that did not look like anything that had ever been a ray.

I slipped it into my apron pocket before the crowd came down the slip. It lives in the biscuit tin with your birthday card now. When I hold it up to the lamp the colour shifts, deep green at the top, then the blue creeping in as if someone is breathing on it.

Come home on the spring tide, Tom. Bring the good knife back, and if you ever see anything swim the way that fin looked, sharp at the end and turning away from the boat, don't go after it. Love, Nell

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