Colourful watercolour-style tattoo on a thigh showing a mermaid on a rock beneath a large glowing full moon, with a blue underwater scene of fish and coral below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid under a full moon on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo wraps around the outer thigh. Above, a mermaid sits on a rock beneath a huge glowing full moon, with a pale pink and orange sky. Below the waterline, blue sea life includes striped fish, coral and a dark rocky formation, all rendered with soft blended shading and bright colour.

Thigh Mermaid Moon Sea Fish Coral Underwater Rock Sky

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has come over the causeway again by the time you reach the gate of Carrick Vane, and the portcullis is furred with weed. You have counted the steps down into the drowned hall eleven times this winter, always with a lamp that gutters in the cold air. Tonight the moon is full and sits on the broken keep like a coin someone has forgotten to collect.

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Below the waterline the old rooms are still furnished in your mind: a table with its cloth gone green, a row of silver fish hanging where the tapestries used to be, gold coins scattered like pebbles across the floor of the great hall. Something moves at the edge of the lamplight, a flick of tail and a face turned away before you can see it properly. The fishermen's wives told you never to answer when she sings, so you have never answered.

Tonight she is not singing. She sits on the rock at the top of the stair, combing her hair with a comb made of bone, and she says your name the way your mother used to, as if it were a question she already knows the answer to. You ask what she wants. She tips her head towards the tower, where the bell rope hangs in the dark, the bell that nobody has rung since the sea took the village.

You take the rope in both hands and pull. The sound goes out over the water, low and wrong, and every fish in the drowned hall turns to face the same direction, the way the sea does before a storm. Then the moon slides behind cloud, and you realise you are the one holding the rope now, and she has gone down the stair without a splash.