Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a dark-haired mermaid with teal scales, red roses and a conch shell, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with roses and shell on a limb

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with long dark hair and a tearful expression is the central figure, her teal scaled tail curling below her. Red roses, a pale conch shell, a small red bug on a flower and two outlined diamond shapes surround her, with a rope-like curve along the right edge. Bold black outlines and smooth colour shading in teal, red, orange and brown give the piece a contrasting, saturated finish.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Mermaid Rose Shell Diamond Ladybird Flower Rope Scale

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she's been at the herring again. You want the tale of Marrow Lane? Then hush your mouths, because the tide's on the turn and the sea always listens for its own name.

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Mermaid Nell Carrick came up the Cask Street culvert every night the fog rolled in, and she sat beneath the lamp outside Quaye's chandlery with her great green tail coiled on the wet cobbles. Her tears ran down her cheeks as if they were paying rent, and the lamplighter, a lonely man called Tobias Quaye, swore he could fill a bucket from them by morning. He never once asked why she cried. He only brought her a red rose from his window box each evening and set it on the step, and she would tuck it behind her ear without a word.

One night she spoke. She said she wanted the rope that had tied her to the trawler the summer she was caught, the rope still coiled in the hold of a boat rotting in dock. Tobias went down into the dark hull for her and came back with his palms torn raw. She took the rope, wound it once around her wrist, then pressed the spiral conch from his grandmother's mantel to her ear and listened to her own sea roaring inside it.

She paid him with the two little diamonds the drowned captain had left in her keeping, tossing them back into the harbour where they sank like coins. In the morning the step was wet with salt, a ladybird was walking the edge of a rose petal, and the lamp had gone out for good. Quaye's bucket held nothing but seawater and one red petal, and when the fog lifted the harbour lay calm all the way to Ireland.