Fine line mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair, a shell top and blue wash water splashes on the lower leg.

Mermaid with red hair on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A seated mermaid figure is drawn in black outline with her head turned down and her long red hair sweeping across the upper part of the design. A lilac shell covers her chest, and her tail curves into a splash of blue wash that sits along the bottom of the piece. The line work is clean and even, with flat red and blue colour filling the hair and water and leaving the skin tone showing through the figure.

Fine line Calf Mermaid Red hair Shell Water Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The trough has frozen again by the time you reach the yard, a grey skin over the water that the cattle have already tried and given up on. You take the sledgehammer off its hook and break it in three blows, the way your father taught you, the shards skittering across the concrete like dropped plates.

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Behind you the kitchen window is steamed to a blur. Your mother is still at the Aga, sorting the shell box she hasn't opened since your gran died, and she has asked you twice whether you want the lilac one. It came back from Scarborough in 1961 wrapped in a wool sock. Gran swore it had been given to her by a girl with red hair who swam out past the groynes and never came in again, though Gran was never a reliable witness to anything that happened before tea.

You take the shell anyway. It is cold as a coin in your palm and smells of nothing but iron and old paper. Past the far field the sea wall is a dark line under a sky the colour of pewter, and the dyke is frozen too, so for once the water is not going anywhere. You find yourself thinking of a long red tail curled beneath the ice, patient, waiting for the thaw.

When you walk back, the trough is already skinning over again. You stop, lift the hammer, and let it fall.