Colour tattoo of a mermaid with flowing red hair, a shell top and blue wash below, outlined in black on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with red hair and shell top

Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid seen from behind or in profile, with long red hair blowing to one side and a purple shell covering her chest. Bold black outlines define the figure and hair, with loose red fill and sketchy strokes. Below her, blue wash shapes suggest water and spread across the lower part of the design against the skin.

Other Mermaid Hair Shell Water Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind had been backing round to the north for three days when Ada Corrie hauled her creel up the slip at Inish Vael and found a purple shell in it, big as a cupped hand, with a long strand of red hair caught in its lip like weed.

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Nobody on the island would say the sea owed them anything, but her father used to say a debt to the water was paid in breath, not coin. So she sat on the harbour wall through the afternoon, turning the shell over in her lap, until the tide came in red under the low sun and the water between the rocks began to thicken with blue, like ink let fall into a glass.

The mermaid rose beside the wall at dusk. She did not sing. She held out one hand, palm up, and her hair lifted from her shoulders and streamed sideways in the wind as though it had somewhere else to be. "You have my covering," she said. "I will have it back, and I will have the thing you meant to sell it for." Ada had meant to take it to the dealer on the mainland for the price of a winter's coal.

She gave the shell back. The mermaid settled it over her chest and sank without a ripple, and in the morning the creel was full of herring and the wall was dusted with blue salt that would not wash off. Ada never sold anything the sea gave her again. The tin on her dresser still holds one dry red hair, pressed flat, and when the wind comes round to the north it lifts the lid by itself.