Colour traditional tattoo on a calf of a pin-up mermaid with a flower in her hair, surrounded by waves, pineapple, watermelon, orange slices, grapes and a pink flamingo inside a rope frame.

Mermaid and tropical fruit on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A pin-up style mermaid with a flower in her hair lies within an oval rope frame, her seashell top and green scaled tail rising from blue waves. Around her are a pineapple, a watermelon slice, orange slices, a bunch of grapes and a pink flamingo, all drawn with bold black outlines and flat fills. The background behind the figure is a warm orange and pink gradient, and the palette is bright and saturated throughout.

Traditional Calf Mermaid Pin-up Flower Wave Pineapple Flamingo Rope frame Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last waltz at the Saltmarsh Pier ballroom was never played until Ivy Moss had finished counting her fruit. Tonight she was on her knees behind the trestle table, counting oranges for the third time, while the bandleader Frank Dorey brushed the snare and pretended not to watch the clock above the bar.

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Ivy had sold fruit to the dancers since the war, when pineapples were a rumour and tins arrived in crates stamped for officers. The younger girls called her stall the shipwreck, but Ivy kept it piled high: grapes from a grower in Kent, a watermelon she had halved for a sailor who promised to come back for it, and a pink flamingo painted on a board by her late husband, a sign writer who had once lettered the Gaiety's posters and never once been paid for the flamingo.

Her husband had also painted the mermaid on the back board, a woman lying on a blue wave with a flower tucked behind one ear, framed in a coil of rope so the whole stall looked like a porthole onto some warmer sea. Every spring Ivy went over the paint with a fresh coat, and every spring the colours came out a shade more defiant, the orange sky turning the colour of a sunset over a harbour she had never visited.

At twenty to eleven a boy in a borrowed suit came running up the pier, asking for the watermelon. Ivy looked at the clock, at the empty floor, at the half-melon wrapped in greaseproof paper under the counter. She handed it over with a sugared orange on top and told him the sailor had been and gone, but the flamingo had kept his promise. Then she lowered the shutter, and the band struck up the last waltz while the lamps went out one by one along the boards.