Colour tattoo of a mermaid with a teal scaled tail on the ankle and top of a bare foot, standing on wet sand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid tattoo on the ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with long brown hair reclines along the ankle, her teal and green scaled tail curving down towards the top of the foot. The design uses dark outlines with soft grey shading on the figure and bright teal scales. The bare foot is photographed from the side on wet, sandy ground, with water droplets on the skin.

Ankle Mermaid Scale Hair Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came to Saltmarsh Green the week the herring boats came in late, and Abel Quarrie put his mermaid behind the coconut shy where the lamps were dimmest. For a penny you could watch her comb her long brown hair with a bone comb while the tank water slopped against the glass. Nobody asked where she had come from. Quarrie said she had been sold to him by a sailor who owed him money, and the village believed him because it was easier than believing anything else.

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Nell swept the sawdust from the rides for her keep, and so she was the one who saw the mermaid's tail dull each night the tank was left to stand. Its teal scales went grey at the edges, like a coin left in the rain. On the fourth evening the mermaid tapped the glass with a whelk shell and said, very quietly, that the tide would take her name if someone carried it down to the water. Nell asked what the name was. The mermaid told her, and Nell said it over and over all the way to the sea wall so she would not lose it.

Quarrie caught her coming back past the lamps. He shook her by the collar and said the fair would pack up on Sunday and the mermaid would go with it, and he did not want to hear any more nonsense about names. Nell said nothing. On Sunday, at the lowest ebb, she unhooked the padlock and let the water out across the mud.

In the morning the tank was empty. A wet track ran from it, across the sand, down to where the sea was still shallow and silver. Caught on the lip of the glass was one teal scale, no bigger than a fingernail, and Nell kept it in her purse for the rest of her life.