Colour tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a green tail, a blue flower, a sunflower and pink watercolour washes on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with flowers on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red-haired mermaid with a green scaled tail sits at the centre of the design, surrounded by a large blue flower, a sunflower and pink and purple watercolour-style washes. The mermaid's hair and a red shape below her tail are rendered with soft shading and flowing lines. Bright colour dominates, with smooth gradients and a loose, painterly background across the upper arm and shoulder.

Neo-trad Upper arm Mermaid Red hair Flower Blue flower Sunflower Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets are already heavy with brine when you reach the shingle at Akrotiri, and the boy who sells lamp oil is shouting about the tide again. You do not look at the water. Your mother taught you that the sea notices women who stare at it, so you keep your eyes on the gulls wheeling over the fish sheds, their wings caught pink by the last of the sun.

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She is waiting on the flat rock below the headland, as she has been every evening since the spring storms. Her hair spills over one shoulder the colour of copper left out in the rain, and her tail, green as bottle glass, lies curled in the shallows like a sleeping dog. Around her the water blooms with blue irises and a heavy golden flower with petals the colour of new bronze. She says nothing. She lays one bloom at your feet, and the ache in your back from hauling Demetrios's boat up the beach goes quiet.

Demetrios came home last month with empty nets and a story about a red-haired woman who had taken his catch as a toll. You laughed at him. Now you understand that the toll was never fish. Every flower she brings is something the sea has taken from this village, and every one she gives back asks for a name in exchange, spoken aloud on the shore where the water can hear it.

You kneel on the wet stone and say your mother's name, the one nobody has spoken since the fever. The sea goes flat as oil. The irises drift out past the headland, and in the morning the nets come home full, while the gulls sit silent on the sheds and do not look at the water either.