Colour tattoo of a seated mermaid with flowing purple hair and a green scaled tail, placed on the upper back.

Mermaid with purple hair on upper back

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The tattoo shows a mermaid seen from behind, seated with one arm reaching down and her long purple hair blowing to one side. Her tail is rendered in green scales with lighter highlights, and the fin has bands of green and tan. The shading is soft and smooth, with colour blending into the skin tone, and the figure sits centrally on a pale, out-of-focus back.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring boats had been gone three days when Morag Ferrie walked the sea wall with a basket of bread and found the mermaid sitting on the tide-stone at the end of the harbour. She had her back to the town and one hand flat on the wet rock, as if feeling for a door. Her hair was the colour of mussel shells and it blew out sideways though there was no wind.

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Morag asked her what she was looking for. The mermaid said she had lost a comb in the year the bell broke, and that the sea had taken it to the far bank where the old wreck lay. Morag had a comb of her own, horn with three teeth missing, and she held it out. The mermaid did not turn around. She only lifted her green tail a little from the water, so that the fin spread wide and banded like the sand at low tide, and Morag saw that the fin had been torn at one edge and mended with threads of copper.

Morag had mended nets all her life. She knew the look of a repair that meant to hold. She sat down on the cold stone and began to work the threads loose, and the mermaid waited, and the gulls went over, and the bell that had been broken for forty years gave out one low note across the water. When the last thread came free, the mermaid slipped the horn comb through her hair and dropped into the harbour without a splash. In the morning there was a single shell on the tide-stone, pale and cracked, and nobody in town could say where it came from.

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