Full-colour tattoo of a mermaid with blue-green scales and a flowing purple tail, arm raised, on the outer thigh.

Mermaid with raised arm on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mermaid reaches upwards with one arm while her long, flowing hair trails behind her. Her tail curls down the thigh in blue-green scales with purple fin edges. The shading is smooth and painterly, with the colour strongest in the tail and hair against the lighter skin tones of the figure.

Thigh Mermaid Hair Scale Tail Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea had taken the oars in the autumn gale, so Maud Tellick walked the tide line each morning with a basket on her hip, gathering whatever the water chose to return. On the fourth morning she found the mermaid lying in a pool among the black wrack, one arm thrown up at the gulls as though she meant to climb out of the sky.

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Her hair spread across the stones like weed, dark as a mussel shell where the light failed and violet at the frayed ends. Her tail was blue-green and scaled like a herring's back, its fins edged in purple that had torn in places. She did not look at Maud. She looked past her, at the water going out grey over the sand.

"Put me back in the sea," the mermaid said, "and the boat your father lost will come home on the next flood." Maud had heard that tale from her grandmother and had never believed a word of it. Still, the tide was leaving and the fins were drying white at the edges, so she knelt, hooked her arms beneath the cold weight of the tail and dragged her across the shingle, one hand gripping a fistful of hair that smelt of brine and iron.

At the edge of the surf the mermaid rose on her arm, lifted her hand once more towards the gulls, and slid under without a splash. Maud stood up to her ankles in the foam, waiting for something to happen. Behind her, on the slipway, the oars lay in a neat row, wrapped in kelp and dripping, as if someone had only just set them down.