Colour tattoo across a person's upper back showing a red-haired mermaid on a rock beneath a cratered moon against a blue, orange and green nebula.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid on a rock beneath a moon on the back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A red-haired mermaid sits on a teal rock at the lower centre, facing a large cratered moon rendered with fine shading and highlights. Swirling blue, green, orange and purple clouds with scattered stars fill the background and spread across the shoulder blade. The soft, painterly colour blends into the skin tones at the edges, and the composition is centred on the moon.

Realism Back Mermaid Moon Planet Nebula Galaxy Star Rock Crater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The moon came up over Skerrin Point the way it always did, too large and too near, and Maren had long since stopped pretending she was not waiting for it. She sat on the teal rock where the kelp gave way to black water, her tail curled beneath her like a dropped ribbon, and watched the craters fill with a light that came from nowhere she could reach.

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The fishwives in the harbour said the moon was only a stone that had lost its way, and that the clouds of colour drifting behind it were the breath of ships the sea had swallowed. Maren did not believe them. She had counted, one winter, the seventeen times the spring tide had tried to take her rock and failed. She had watched the lamp boys on the harbour wall send their small blue lanterns up into the dark, and she had learned that things which looked impossible from below were often only waiting for someone to stay still long enough.

On the night of the highest tide she slid from the rock and let the water close over her head. The moon laid a silver road across the sea, and she followed it past the buoys, past the drowned bell that still rang faintly when the current turned, until the water thinned to something like starlight and she could no longer tell where the sea stopped and the sky began. Her hair floated out around her, bright as a fresh cut.

At dawn she was back on the rock, dry in patches, with a single scale stuck to the stone beside her. The moon had gone pale and small over the headland. She pressed the scale flat with her thumb and told herself that next month the tide would be just as high, and the road just as bright, and that the moon, which had never once come down to meet her, would keep its distance and she would keep hers.