Black and grey realism tattoo of a mermaid with long flowing hair and a scaled tail, covering a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid across the upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid sits in profile across the upper back, with her head turned down and long hair falling over one shoulder. The scales of her tail are finely shaded and her fin is detailed with soft grey gradients. The composition is tall and vertical, with the tail curling at the bottom of the design.

Realism Back Mermaid Long hair Scale Tail Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the fire, you who came up from the harbour smelling of salt and bad temper, and let me tell you about the girl who sat on the rocks below Sidon and combed her hair with a bone comb, the way the women here do when they have decided not to speak to the men.

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Her hair was long and dark and it fell over one shoulder like a net left out to dry. The net-mender's son, a boy called Teuthis, climbed the headland every evening to watch her, and every evening she let the hair drift so that he could see only the curve of her back and the great grey scales of her tail sliding under the water. He brought her figs wrapped in fig leaves. She took them and ate them without looking up, and that was how they courted for three summers, with nothing said.

Then the autumn gale came off the sea and his father's boat went down past the reef with Teuthis in it. The girl rose from the rocks and dived, and when the men found him at dawn he lay on the sand with weed tangled in his fingers and the bone comb pressed into his palm, its teeth full of her hair.

She never came up the headland again. But the fishermen say that on still evenings a grey tail still curls in the shallows below the town, and a woman sits there with her head bent low, combing out the salt, slow and careful, as though she has all the time the sea can give her and none of it is his.