Colour tattoo of a mermaid with a bold black outline, red hair, a purple shell top and a blue and green tail, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid outline with coloured tail on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised mermaid in profile, with long flowing red hair, a small purple shell top and a split tail with a blue fin and a green fin. Bold black outlines define every shape, and the colour is applied in flat, lightly graded fills. The design sits centrally on a pale patch of skin against a dark green background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite,

Keep reading

The boat came in on Tuesday with its name painted over. Old Tobias says the new owner wanted it blank, but you can still see the bow carving under the grey, a girl with a crest of red hair blown back over her ears and a shell at her chest like she was dressing for church. Her tail splits at the bottom into two fins, one the colour of a kingfisher and one the green of the weed on the slipway. I have been sitting on the harbour wall every evening trying to decide whether she is looking at the water or away from it.

Mother wrote again. The chapel roof is being mended with the money from the regatta, and she wants to know whether you will be home for the blessing of the new bell. I told her I would ask you. I did not tell her that I have been practising your handwriting on the back of the fish invoices, because you always said mine looked like a crab had walked across the page.

Tobias let me scrape the old paint off her fins with a bit of glass on Saturday. Underneath the blue there was a line of tiny gold stars, the kind you used to stick on our schoolbooks, and under those a name in pencil I could not read. I have kept the flake of paint in an envelope in the drawer with your birthday ribbon. When you come, I want you to read it and tell me who she was.

Come home before the tide turns on the thirtieth. The carving will still be there, I promise, though Tobias says she is more stubborn than the boat.

Love, Ada

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