Colour fine line tattoo of a mermaid with flowing red hair and a teal peacock feather tail, placed on the lower back.

Mermaid with peacock tail on lower back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A mermaid sits with her long red hair blowing to one side, her arm resting on her knee and her tail curling down to the right. The tail scales shade from teal to purple and the fin is drawn as peacock feathers with eye motifs in yellow, purple and blue. The linework is fine and the colour is bright and even against the bare skin, with the photo taken straight on across the lower back.

Fine line Back Mermaid Peacock feather Hair Tail Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The peacock has got himself shut in the potting shed again, and I am writing this sat on the upturned bucket with him glaring at me from the bench. You will laugh, but he has lost another tail. I counted the feathers along the cliff path this morning, forty-one of them, each with its eye still open, which is the kind of thing Mother would have called a sign and then made us sweep up anyway.

The feathers do not blow away the way they should. They drift down the wall to the cove and collect in the rockpool below the old slipway. That is where I found her on Tuesday, a woman with hair the colour of rhubarb sat on the flat stone, combing it out with her fingers and looking at the feathers as if they were letters addressed to her. She did not seem surprised to see me. She only asked whether the peacock was still angry about the lettuces.

I went down again on Thursday with the bucket and found the pool full of feathers, every one of them turned so its eye faced the sky. She had tied a few together with kelp and hung them on the railing, a little fan of blue and gold, and she said I could keep the ones I wanted if I left her the last of the lupins for the rockpool crabs. I left her the lupins.

I am writing because I think you should come down in June. The garden is going to seed and the wall is nearly gone to the sea, and I would rather you saw it with me than heard about it second hand. Bring your good boots. I will save you a feather.

Love, Nell