Fine line mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair, a shell top and a blue watercolour wash, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with red hair in watercolour wash

Fine line · Other · Colour · Photo

A mermaid is drawn in a simple black outline, shown from the side with her long red hair swept up and over her head. She wears a lilac shell top, and the tail and background are filled with loose blue watercolour-style wash that runs past the linework. The black outline is clean and thin, while the red, blue and purple washes are soft-edged and sit mostly within or just beyond the lines.

Fine line Other Mermaid Red hair Shell Wave Ocean

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the gulls were awake, Mags Tulley lit the ovens in the bakery on Quay Street and found the flour sack already open. Someone had dipped a hand into it and left prints the colour of wet sand on the boards. She swept them up and said nothing, because her father had told her that the sea took its bread where it could find it, and a baker who grumbled got salt in her loaves.

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The next morning the prints were there again, and beside them a row of small wet shells lined up on the sill like coins. Mags set a warm cob on the sill for the price. By the third morning she had stopped sleeping and started watching from behind the flour bins, and at the first grey smudge of light a woman came up the harbour steps on her hands, red hair pouring down her back, a lilac shell pinned at her chest as if she had dressed for church. Her tail slid over the cobbles like a wet rope, and she did not look at Mags at all. She looked at the bread.

Mags did not speak. She split a loaf, buttered it, and set it down, and the woman ate with her eyes shut, slowly, the way the tide comes up a beach. When the sky went pink over the fish market she slid back down into the harbour, and the water closed without a ripple.

After that the shells came every morning and Mags baked a little extra. Years later, when the bakery had a new sign and her hair had gone the colour of ash, she still left the sill bare on the first day of each month. Nobody asked why. The fishermen said the sea had its own bakers, and they were not wrong, but the bread went out on the tide all the same.