Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a braided-haired mermaid holding a star wand, with a scaled tail in ochre, brown and purple, on a lower limb, shown beside its original teal artwork.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with braided hair and scaled tail

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with long braided hair and pale, half-closed eyes cradles a star-tipped wand, her scaled tail coiling around the composition. The tattoo uses bold outlines, shaded grey hair and ochre, brown and purple scales, with dotted accents along the edges. The right panel shows the original illustration on a teal background, with black scales, red details and a cream-coloured tail fin.

Neo-trad Other Mermaid Braid Star Wand Scale Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, it spits when the wind comes round the harbour wall. Aye, sit there, where the coil of rope keeps the draught off. My grandfather fished out of Tarbert the year the herring went strange, and he swore to me on his mother's Bible that he once hauled up a net with nothing in it but a braid of black hair, long as a man's arm, and tied off at the end with a bit of tarred twine.

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Nobody believed him, least of all his crew. They said he'd been at the rum since Lammas. But he kept that braid in a biscuit tin under his bunk, and every spring he'd take it out and lay it on the cabin table and talk to it, low, the way you'd talk to a dog that's lost its way. Gran said it was mooring hair, that the sea gives back what it's owed. Gran said a lot of things.

Then the autumn the boats came in light, and a girl turned up at the quay with a star-tipped stick and a face like cold milk. She asked for the man who had the hair. Grandfather went white as a gull's belly and walked her out past the fish market himself, and what they said to each other on the slipway, nobody heard. But the next morning the tin was empty, and the sea had gone calm as a church for a week.

I asked him once if she'd been a selkie or a drowned bride. He only looked at the tide and said she had come up to collect what was owed, and had taken it fairly.