Colour tattoo of a mermaid with a green and teal tail and flowing hair, drawn in a neo-traditional style with bold black outlines on the side of a limb.

Green mermaid tattoo on a side limb

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A mermaid reclines in a curved pose, with a long tail that sweeps up and over the top of the design into a large fan of teal and green fins. Her hair trails downward in thin, wavy strands, and the figure is drawn with dark, even outlines. The shading is soft and the colour is applied in greens, teals, yellows and touches of orange, with the figure set against plain skin.

Neo-trad Other Mermaid Tail Fin Hair Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Day nineteen out of Valparaíso, and the Marguerite Lowe has finally stopped groaning in the swell. Captain Harrow says the wind will hold until the Horn, which is what he said on the eleventh day too, so I have stopped writing it down as a fact and only as a hope. Mr Pell, the cook, swears there is a mermaid under the forecastle hatch. He has been feeding her the heel of the bread since Tuesday and claims the crumbs are gone by morning.

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I went down with the lantern last night to see for myself. There was nothing but the water sloshing against the bilge boards and a smell of tar and wet rope. But on the ladder rung someone had left a strand of hair, long and pale green, wound round the iron like weed. I have it pinned in my logbook now, between the page for the fourteenth and the page where I wrote my sister's address in case I am lost off Cape Froward.

Pell says a mermaid only comes aboard when a ship is carrying someone who will not be coming home the same way they left. He says it kindly, which is how I know he means me. I told him I have never once in my life been the sort of person the sea wants. He laughed and said the sea has never once asked what sort of person I was.

This morning the swell rolled up under the bow and a long fin broke the surface beside the rail, teal and ribbed like a fan dipped in the sunrise. It curled once, the way a cat turns in its sleep, and was gone. I am writing this with the lantern still lit, because I do not want to be the only one who saw it, and because the bread on the cook's plate this morning was untouched.