Black and grey realism tattoo of a mermaid draped over an anchor on the upper arm and shoulder.

Mermaid draped over an anchor on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid with long, wind-blown hair rests across a large anchor, with her scaled tail curling down past the anchor's shank. The linework is soft and the scales and hair are rendered with smooth grey shading and highlights. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder, shown in a close, slightly angled photograph against a grey sleeve.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Mermaid Anchor Scale Hair

Find an artist for this

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

The lift in Trinity House had been dead since the August gale, so I carried the anchor up fourteen flights on my shoulder, stopping on every landing to swear at it. Dad dragged the thing off the Margate slipway years ago and it had lived under his stairs ever since, rust bleeding onto the carpet. Nobody else wanted it. I wanted it on the balcony, pointing at the sea, before the light went.

Keep reading

Mrs Adeyemi was waiting on the ninth floor with a flask and an opinion. "You'll have the whole block talking," she said. "They talk anyway," I said, and she laughed, then looked at the anchor for a long time. "My mother said a mermaid holds on to anything that once held her." I didn't ask what that meant. I just took the other end and kept climbing.

On the fourteenth floor I bolted the anchor to the rail with fixings Dad had never got round to buying. The sun was sliding behind the flats across the water. I hadn't noticed the mermaid when we hauled it out of the cupboard, but now she caught the low light, her scaled tail curling down the shank and her hair lifting in a wind that came off the estuary all at once.

Mrs Adeyemi was right, of course. Somebody in the car park was already filming the balcony, and by morning the whole block would have a view on it. I didn't mind. The gulls had found the tail, and for once the anchor was pointing the right way, out past the breakwater, towards wherever Dad had been heading the day he never came back up the slip.