Colour realism tattoo on a thigh showing a mermaid on a rock beneath a large yellow moon, with a blue underwater scene of fish and coral below the waterline.

Mermaid under a full moon on a leg

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with long red hair sits on a dark rock beneath a large glowing yellow moon, with her tail trailing over a painted waterline. Below the water, blue ocean tones show orange and yellow fish, coral and sea plants, with soft gradients and fine detail. The piece is in full colour and fills the length of the leg, with the upper scene fading into a pale sky.

Realism Thigh Mermaid Moon Ocean Fish Coral Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell rope had gone slack again, so Brother Anselm took the boat out over the sand before the tide turned. The abbot had said the mainland was too far to send for a mason, and the chapel steps on the rock would not stand another winter of spray. The moon was full and bright enough to read the psalter by, and he saw her before he saw the rock: a woman sitting on the dark stone with her hair hanging down her back, the colour of rust, her tail trailing into the water as if the sea had only lent it to her for the night.

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She did not look up at once. When she did, her eyes were the grey of the tide, and she said the bell had been ringing through her sleep for forty years. Each full moon the monks swung the rope, and the sound went down through the water into the drowned church, where the choir still stood in its stalls. The fish came up to listen and crowded the coral until the sea plants could not breathe. Anselm asked what she wanted. She said only silence on the nights the moon was full, and in return she would show him what the bell was calling for.

She slid off the rock, and he leaned over the gunwale. Beneath the water the blue went down for ever. He saw the chapel roof tilted like a reed, orange and yellow fish turning through gardens of coral, and a row of bells lying in the nave like dropped cups. He understood then why the abbot's predecessor had locked the tower door the year of the great storm, and why no one in the refectory said the name of the drowned prior aloud.

Anselm went back and told the abbot the rope would stay tied on full moons. The abbot wrote it in the book of rules beside the other odd entries about the tides. For the rest of his life, on the nights the moon hung gold over the rock, Anselm sat in the boat with his hands in his lap and heard nothing at all. On the morning he died, a single scale the colour of marigold was found dry on the chapel step, as though it had been left there for him to carry home.