Solid black mermaid silhouette with two small fish silhouettes trailing below, on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Mermaid silhouette and fish on a wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black silhouette of a mermaid with long flowing hair and a tail, with two smaller fish shapes trailing beneath her. The design is filled solid black with no visible shading or fine linework, and the edges are clean. The arm is angled diagonally across the frame against a pale background, with the hand raised at the top left.

Blackwork Forearm Mermaid Fish Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide office in Lowestoft had gone automatic in the spring, but Nell still kept the old brass gauge on her desk, the one with the little silhouette of a mermaid painted on its face. Nobody had asked her to keep it. The new sensors sent their numbers straight to the harbour board, and the board sent back polite notices about calibration. Nell liked the gauge because it did not need her to believe anything.

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On Tuesday a boy came in from the fish quay with a dented bucket and a story about a seal that had followed his skiff past the breakwater and then stopped, as though waiting for something. He wanted the tide tables checked. Nell pulled up the readings and found nothing wrong with them. The sea had risen exactly as predicted and dropped exactly as predicted, and still the boy kept looking at the window, where the grey water heaved against the wall.

She found herself telling him about her grandmother, who had worked the same desk before the sensors, and who used to say the mermaid on the gauge was not a decoration but a tally. Three small fish under her tail meant three drowned men still owed a name in the book. Nell had never believed it. She reached into the bottom drawer, took out the ledger, and turned to the page with three blank lines, and then, for no good reason, she wrote the boy's name on the first one.