Mixed colour tattoo on a stomach showing a red-haired mermaid beside a greyscale sailing ship, with a treasure chest and skull on the seabed.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid, shipwreck and treasure chest on the stomach

Other · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the abdomen, with a greyscale sailing ship with shaded sails on the left and a colour mermaid with red hair and a teal tail on the right. Along the lower left, a treasure chest, a skull, a shell and seabed details are rendered in soft grey shading. The composition flows across the skin from the ship down to the sea floor, with a navel piercing visible at the centre.

Other Mermaid Sailing ship Skull Shell Coral

Find an artist for this

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

Your father's boat, the Margaret Ann, comes back from the Dogger grounds with its nets empty for the third week running, and the men on the quay stop asking you where the fish went. You know where they went. You have watched the water off the Skerry bank since you were small enough to be lifted onto the gunwale to look.

Keep reading

Out past the buoy the sea turns from grey to green, and on the bottom sits the wreck of a galleon nobody in Hartlepool will name. Her sails still hang in the silt like washing left out in a storm. The mermaid who keeps her, Ysolde, has hair the colour of rust that drifts like weed and a tail the green of the bottle glass the fishwives sell by the harbour wall. She has never once let your nets snag on the bow. In return she asks for one thing a year: a name spoken aloud over the open chest.

This autumn you refuse. You tell the crew the sea is a ledger and you will not keep their debts. The Margaret Ann hauls up nothing but a blackened lantern and a skull that grins at you from the mesh, and the next morning your father is gone from his bunk, the cabin door swinging open on the tide.

You go out alone at slack water with a kettle of stewed tea and a bent sixpence. The chest lid is already lifted. Beneath the tarnished gold lies a folded sail with your father's name stitched in red thread, and beside it a tin box holding the letter you never posted. You speak his name into the green dark. The sea breathes out, the fish come home, and your father's boots are standing on the quay at dawn, wet to the knee.