Watercolour-style mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair and a blue scaled tail, sitting on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid sits with her back turned, long red-orange hair flowing over one shoulder and a blue scaled tail curling beneath her. Loose black linework outlines the figure and tail, while soft blue, orange and purple washes and dark ink splashes fill the design. The tattoo covers most of a forearm, set against a dark background.

Forearm Mermaid Tail Hair Scale Splash Watercolour

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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

The sports hall still smells of chlorine and floor polish, which nobody warned me would make forty-one feel like fourteen. Mr Dakin has laid name badges out on a trestle table by the fire doors, and I stand there reading faces before I can find the names underneath them. Half the room has gone grey at the temples. The other half has gone very loud.

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Nobody has written Ruth Ambler on a badge, because she left after Year Nine and never came back to Saltcote. What I remember is her paint tin, a cheap set of pan colours with the blue worn down to a crescent, and the way she would breathe on a dry brush, drop one bead of water onto the paper and tip the sheet until the colour ran into the shape of a tail. She painted mermaids on the inside of her planner, on dinner tickets, on the steamed-up glass of the late bus. Mrs Hale took her brushes off her twice.

Gary Pryce, holding a plastic cup of squash like a microphone, tells me Ruth is in Falmouth now, running a little gallery with her husband and selling the same mermaids to people who pay for them. I ask whether she ever painted a face. He frowns, thinks, and shakes his head. Then I realise she painted every one from behind, hair falling over one shoulder, because she told me once that the face was the sea's business and not hers to give away.

On the way out I find a sheet of watercolour paper pinned to the noticeboard by the lockers, curling at the corners, with old drawing pins still in it. It is a mermaid with her back turned, a blue tail bleeding into grey where the water went on too fast. I peel it free and carry it out to the car park, where the rain has started, and hold it flat against the bonnet until the ink under my thumb begins to run.