Colour realism tattoo on a thigh showing a mermaid on a rock beneath a glowing full moon, with an underwater scene of a sunken ship, gold coins and coral below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid under a full moon on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid seated on a rock silhouetted against a large, glowing full moon in a hazy sky. A horizontal waterline divides the design, and below it a sunken ship, scattered gold coins, fish and coral appear in deep blues and greens. The shading is soft and painterly, with smooth colour blends and bright highlights on the moon and coins, and the design wraps around the leg.

Realism Thigh Mermaid Moon Ocean Fish Coral Rock

Find an artist for this

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

Every autumn the fishermen of Carrow Bay said the sea kept its debts, and that a wreck was only a loan waiting to be called in. The old boat Mistress Ansel had gone down off the Gull Rock in the great blow of the year the bells cracked, carrying a chest of Spanish coin that her owner, Tobias Wrenn, had never declared to the harbour master. Wrenn drowned with his cargo still aboard. His widow, Maud, kept the house above the slip and said nothing about gold to anyone.

Keep reading

On the night of the full harvest moon, Maud's daughter Edie walked down to the water to fetch the lamp she had left on the breakwater. She found a woman sitting on the wet rock with her tail curled in the shallows, combing hair the colour of rust with a fishbone comb. The moon was so large over the bay that it seemed to lean on the water. The woman did not look up. She said only, "Your father's chest is under the third rib of the hull, and the lid is open. The fish have been keeping it tidy."

Edie went home without the lamp. The next morning she rowed out with a hook and a rope, and the sea was clear as glass. She saw the ship lying on its side in a bed of green weed, the timbers furred with coral, the fish turning in gold light as if the coins had sunk and drawn them down. She filled her apron with what she could carry and gave the rest back to the dark, because the woman had warned her that greed on that bed would drown a second family.

The coins bought a roof for the widow and a new hull for the slip. Edie never told anyone how she had learned where to look. Some nights, when the moon sat full over Gull Rock, she still left a lamp burning on the breakwater, and in the morning it was always empty, and the comb was always there beside it.