Colour and grey tattoo of a mermaid inside an ornate oval frame on the outer thigh, in a neo-traditional illustrative style.

Mermaid in ornate frame on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid with long dark hair, a starfish and pink orchids in her hair, and a shell at her shoulder is drawn inside a carved, scrollwork oval frame. The face and hair are shaded in grey pencil-like tones, while the water and the mermaid's top use teal and turquoise washes. The composition is tall and centred on the outer thigh, with the frame filling most of the photograph and the background dark.

Neo-trad Thigh Mermaid Frame Starfish Orchid Shell Wave Hair Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Abernethy wanted the frame carved before the painting was finished, which I told him was backwards. He only shrugged and laid a sheet of paper on my bench: a woman's face in grey pencil, her hair lifting as though a tide ran through it. Beneath her, in his neat hand, he had written the measurements of an oval, then the words for a starfish, a cockle shell, and an orchid pinned in her hair. I asked who she was. He said his daughter Marian had walked off the end of the pier in March, and he had dreamt of her every night since, always at the bottom of the water, always combing.

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I carved it through the winter from pale limewood. The scrolls curled like wave crests, the acanthus leaves hung heavy as weed, and the cockle at the base I cut twice because the first looked like a bread roll. Each evening the shavings on the floor smelt of hedgerows after rain. Abernethy came every Friday to inspect the work and never once looked at the wood. He looked at the empty oval in the middle, where the glass would go.

The day I fitted the glass, a painter from Scarborough arrived with the portrait. Teal washes ran over the water, and her face was shaded so softly it seemed to breathe. Abernethy wept and paid me double. That night the frame went up above the parlour mantel, and I walked home along the front with my hands in my pockets.

In the morning my wife said the stairs were wet. I did not tell Abernethy about the sand I found on the frame's carved base when I went back to check the hanging, a fine grey grit, and the orchids, which I had seen fade in the shop, were fresher every week.