Solid black silhouette tattoo of a mermaid reaching upward, with a small fish and a crab, on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid silhouette with fish and crab on wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid silhouette with long flowing hair and a raised arm, trailing a tail, with a small fish and a crab below her. The shapes are solid black fill with clean edges and no shading or interior detail. It is a single-colour design in black ink on pale skin, with a small composition placed diagonally along the inner wrist.

Forearm Mermaid Fish Crab Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it smokes when the wind comes off the marsh, and you'll not want that in your eyes. Right. Where was I? Ah, the ice on Coldharbour Drain, the winter the old sluice froze shut.

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Old Tam Harrow was breaking the ice at the sluice with a crowbar when he heard singing under it. Not a gull, not a dog. A woman's voice, thin as wire, rising up through the black water like a bubble. He knelt and put his ear to the ice, and she sang him the names of every field the drain ran past, which was a kindness, because nobody in the parish could remember them all but her.

The sea had sent her up the drain, and she had not asked to come. A small fish had swum into the sluice after the flood, and a crab no bigger than a farthing had clung to her tail the whole way, pinching at her scales to keep himself warm. She had followed them, meaning to take them back down to the tide, and the drain had kept her, the way drains do. Her arm was up, reaching for the one hole of light in the ice, where the lamp in Tam's kitchen window threw its gold onto the water.

Tam was a practical man. He fetched the mallet and the bucket of salt, and by morning the ice had cracked along the line of his crowbar. She slid out with the fish and the crab, and went down the drain toward the grey sea, singing the field names backwards so they would not be lost.

Every winter since, when the frost is thick, you can see her on the ice at dawn, black against the white, one arm raised. Tam swore it. The fish stayed with her. The crab, I'm told, went back to the sea on the next tide, and that's the part Tam never forgave.