Colour tattoo of a mermaid with flame-like red and orange hair and a blue-green tail, sitting on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with flowing hair on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid silhouette with long, wind-swept hair shading from red to orange and yellow at the top, and a tail curling down in blue and green. The shading is soft and blended, with the tail's scales and fins built up in layered gradients. The design fills the upper arm and shoulder area, with the figure sitting toward the top and the tail sweeping down to the lower edge of the frame.

Upper arm Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Fin

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

The sign painter's kit lived in a biscuit tin under our stairs, and by the time the herring boats came in that March my fingers were permanently the colour of whatever I'd last mixed. Dad had lost the use of his left hand to a winch in '52, so the commissions fell to me: the Nell Ruth's name in gold leaf, hull numbers on the Mousehole boats, the odd board for the chip shop on Quay Street.

Keep reading

Old Mr Tregaskis wanted a figurehead for the Morwenna, a mermaid, but not the pale creature from the calendars in the Ship Inn. "Make her burn," he said, tapping the bow with his pipe. So I mixed vermilion with a pinch of chrome yellow for her hair and lifted it off the wood with a sable brush so it looked like a gale had got into it. I ran her tail down the prow in cobalt, letting it soften to viridian where it met the waterline, and I gave every scale a little layer of light so it would catch the lamps on the quay.

The varnish wouldn't cure in the damp, so the Morwenna went out on the morning tide still tacky. When she came back at dusk, the red had run from the hair in long threads down the hull and into the harbour, and the water along the wall was streaked orange and blue. Mr Tregaskis swore he'd seen the fish turn gold beneath the boat.

I went down to the slip at low water with a rag and a jar of turpentine, and found a woman sitting on the bottom step. Her hair was the colour of my vermilion, dripping and wild, and she was combing it with her fingers and watching me as though I owed her wages. "You were slow," she said. "I'd have done the tail in gold." Then she slid back under the green water, and on the step where she'd been sat a single scale, painted and perfect, which I've kept in the biscuit tin ever since.