Neo-traditional tattoo of a mermaid with flowing golden hair and a teal and pink scaled tail on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with golden hair on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with flowing golden hair curls over a long, scaled tail that shifts from teal to lilac to pink. Her arms are outstretched, and she wears a pearl necklace and shell details at the chest. Bold black outlines, smooth colour fills and soft shading give the piece a bright, illustrative finish.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Three weeks out of Valparaíso the Corinna's fresh water turned sour, and the bosun swore the thing trailing us was bad luck. I was nineteen and kept my mouth shut, because I had seen her too, arms flung wide on the swell as if she were falling backwards through the air instead of sinking through the water.

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Her hair was the colour of the cane sugar we'd lost to damp in the hold, and it floated out around her in ropes that never quite settled. Her tail was the strangest thing I ever looked at. Near the surface, where the light came green, it was teal, then it went lilac where the swell dropped into shadow, and at the tip it was pink, as though someone had dipped it in the evening. Old Matthias said pink meant she was hungry, and that you never gave a mermaid anything you wanted back.

At the Horn the cook's boy, Tomas, began sleeping badly. He wore a string of seed pearls sewn onto thread, a necklace from his dead sister's wedding dress, and every night he sat at the rail turning them over with his thumb. On the fourth night the water went glassy and she rose beside the hull, close enough to touch, reaching up with those long pale arms. Tomas lifted the necklace over his head and held it out. She took it without a sound, looked at him with that small blank face, and sank.

The wind came back by dawn and we ran north with our casks sweet again. Tomas never wore anything round his neck after that. Some nights I still see a flash of pink go down under the waves like a lamp being carried away, and I hope whoever she is carrying the pearls to has the good sense to wear them.

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