Soft colour tattoo of a mermaid with flowing red hair, a purple shell top and a green tail on the inner forearm.

Mermaid with red hair on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid figure with long, flowing red hair turns her head to one side, with a purple shell covering her chest and a green tail fin curving beneath her. The linework is light and sketchy, with the colours applied in soft, watercolour-like washes over a pale skin tone. The figure is set centrally on the forearm, with a dark tattoo partly visible at the bottom edge of the frame.

Forearm Mermaid Red hair Shell Tail Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been painting the names on the fishing fleet since she was twelve, and by that summer the harbour wall at Porthkennack was the only canvas that paid. Her father had ground his pigments from crushed mussel shell and sea glass, and when he died the tin of them came to her with a note in his blocky hand: Don't use the green on anything you can't wash off.

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The mermaid came up the slipway on a Tuesday, just as the tide turned, and sat on the bottom step with her tail in the shallows like a dropped ribbon. Her hair was the red of a lobster pot buoy left out all winter. She held a purple scallop shell against her chest as if it were a hand mirror. She wanted her portrait painted, she said, but not on paper. On the sea.

Nell laid out the tins on the wet stones and worked fast, because the water was climbing and the wash would not hold long. She gave the hair three layers, each one thin as breath on glass. The tail took the green, then a little of the grey from the wall. When she finished, the mermaid turned her head to look back over her shoulder, the way Nell's mother used to do just before saying something she meant.

The sea came over the step and the painting ran. Nell watched the red drain out into the harbour in long threads, and the green go pale and soft, until there was only the slipway and a single purple shell lying on the bottom stone. She put it in her pocket. On the Monday the boats came in with their names freshly sharp, and her father's note was right after all. The green never did come off the harbour wall.