Colour fine line tattoo of a mermaid with flowing red hair and a blue peacock-feather tail, sitting on the lower back above jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with peacock-feather tail on lower back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A mermaid sits facing left with long, wind-blown red hair, rising bubbles above her head and a blue-green tail that ends in peacock-feather fins with purple and pink eye markings. The linework is thin and dark, with soft colour shading on the skin tone, hair and scales. The design curves diagonally across the lower back, with the tail sweeping down towards the waistband of the jeans.

Fine line Back Mermaid Hair Bubble Tail Peacock feather Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule would not cross the Sarn pass until I had tied a blue ribbon to her bridle, so I did it at the last waterfall, where the snow melt comes off the rock in ropes and the air tastes of iron. My uncle had told me the lake above the col belonged to a woman with red hair who sat on the stones and combed it out with her fingers. He said she would tell you your debts if you looked long enough at the water. I did not believe him. I was twenty and sure of most things.

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We climbed through the morning. Near the tarn the wind dropped and the water went so still it held the sky like a plate. Bubbles rose from somewhere under the surface, one, then three, then a string of them, silver and quick. I saw her then, or I saw a shape with a tail that ended in a fan of feathers, each one marked with an eye the colour of a bruise, purple shading to rose. She did not look at me. She watched the bubbles as if they were letters someone had written to her long ago.

I asked her what I owed. She laughed, and the laugh went down the valley and came back off three peaks. 'Nothing you can carry,' she said. 'Give me the feather you took from the peddler's pack at Lower Cross and your mule may go down the far side unbothered.' I had forgotten the feather was in my coat. I took it out, and in the cold it had turned green gold, its eyes bright along the edge. I dropped it on the water. It did not sink.

The mule was over the col before the sun reached the lake, and when I looked back the tail was already gone beneath the reflected peaks. In Lower Cross the peddler's wife met me at the inn door and asked after her feather. I told her it had gone to someone who needed it more. She did not argue. Her eyes were the same colour as the tarn, and she did not blink as often as a person should.