Fine line mermaid tattoo on the side of the ribs, with red flowing hair, a purple shell top and a teal tail fin.

Mermaid outline tattoo on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid in profile, with long red hair streaming up and across the top of the design, a purple shell covering the chest, and a teal tail fin curling at the bottom. The linework is thin and mostly unshaded, with bold coloured lines against the skin and a few lighter skin-toned contour lines. The composition runs vertically along the side of the torso, with the colour fields kept separate from one another.

Fine line Ribs Mermaid Hair Shell Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook of the Gannet Lass kept his knives in a leather roll and his galley fire banked low, and he never once went up on deck after dark. Nobody on that boat did. But the night the pot boiled over and the bread went black, a red-haired woman sat on the sill of the porthole, her arms folded on the glass as though it were the kitchen window of some village she had left behind.

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She asked for salt. Only salt, she said, and a handful of the hard biscuit, and she would tell him where the herring were running thick enough to fill the nets twice over. Abel said that was a poor bargain for a ship's stores. She laughed at that, and the laugh ran off the glass like water off a gutter. Her hair streamed up past the porthole as if a wind were blowing from somewhere under the keel, though the sea lay flat as a plate.

He gave her the salt in a cracked tin cup. She took it down into the black water with a purple shell clasped at her chest, and a flick of her teal tail fin lit the glass green, then she was gone. In the morning the nets came up so heavy the winch groaned, and the skipper swore it was the luck of God and crossed himself twice.

Abel never told him otherwise. Every night after, he set a cup of salt on the galley sill, and every morning the cup was empty and the nets came up silver.