Black and grey mermaid tattoo with a scaled fish tail running along a forearm, with small paw print marks near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey mermaid is tattooed along the outer forearm, her fish tail curving up towards the wrist while her upper body and hair sit near the elbow. The tail has fine scale shading and the figure is outlined with defined lines and soft grey fill. Small paw print and other marks sit near the wrist, and a dark shirt and a microphone stand fill the rest of the frame.

Forearm Mermaid Fish tail Paw print Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The mill race has frozen twice since you left, and Mr Pruett's boy has been skating on it where the water runs slow under the alders. I told him the ice there is a liar. He laughed the way you used to, with his whole chin. Your old dog Tansy still sleeps at the foot of the stile every evening, waiting for the gate to open, and I have stopped telling her you are not coming back this week.

Something in the millpond took the boy's glove on Tuesday. He came up the bank with his hand red and swore it was a fish that had pulled it down, a long grey thing with scales like the ribs of a pine cone and a tail that flicked the water into lace. I did not argue. You remember what Granny Hesket said about the mermaid who wanted a dog for a friend, how she came up out of the reeds with a paw print on her wrist and asked the miller's wife for a hair ribbon. Nobody believed the miller's wife either.

I went down at dusk with the lantern and the blue ribbon you left in the drawer. The water was flat as slate. Then a ripple came slow along the far bank, and I saw a tail curl up out of it, grey and patient, and the shape of a face turned towards the light. I tied the ribbon to the alder root and walked home without looking back, which is what Hesket always said to do.

The glove was on the stile this morning, folded neatly, with the ribbon beside it. Tansy wagged at it for a full minute. Come home soon, love. The gate is still waiting, and so, I think, is the pond.

Yours, Mum