Neo-traditional tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a green tail sitting on a rock inside an ornate beaded frame with shells and a starfish, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid cameo on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A red-haired mermaid with a green tail sits on a rock inside an oval, beaded frame decorated with scrolls, a scallop shell and a seashell. The sea behind her is shaded in grey with horizontal ripple lines, and a starfish and a hanging shell sit on the frame. The mermaid and tail are the only colour, while the frame and background are black and grey shading.

Neo-trad Thigh Mermaid Shell Starfish Bead Rock Sea Scallop shell

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, all of you, and keep your boots off the wet step, the tide has been creeping over it since the spring. No, you can't hold the cameo yet. My grandmother's grandmother dug it out of the silt beneath the drowned library, back when the water still stood at the second-floor windows, and it has been handed down ever since the way you'd pass a full cup across a rocking boat.

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The frame was already dulling then, its scrolls furred with salt and the beads around its rim gone the colour of old rain. Inside, a girl sat on a black rock with her red hair pouring down her back and her green tail tucked beneath her. She gazed at a sea ruled in fine horizontal lines, flat and patient, the way the water lies just before it changes its mind. Oswin, the lighthouse keeper's boy, used to carry the thing up to the tide wall each evening and hold it out over the real sea, comparing the two.

Then the town emptied. The boats stopped coming in, the chapel bell was taken down for its brass, and Oswin stopped going to the wall. His mother found him one night at the top of the lighthouse with the cameo pressed to his chest, counting the points on the starfish. Five, he told her, and five on every real starfish too, so the sea was still making things true out there, even if nobody was left to check.

Now turn it so the lamp catches the rock. There, you see her? She is still waiting for the water to come to her. Who wants to hold her first, and who will carry her up to the wall?