Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a red-haired mermaid in a shell top, with an anchor earring and rope, across the outer thigh.

Mermaid with shell top on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A woman with long, wavy red hair is shown from the waist up, one arm raised behind her head, wearing a shell top and an anchor earring. Rope wraps around the figure and a jellyfish sits at the shoulder, with beaded chains draped across the chest. Bold black outlines, smooth shading and rich colour in reds, purples, teal and gold fill the design against a teal background.

Neo-trad Thigh Mermaid Woman Red hair Shell Anchor Rope Jellyfish Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and keep your voices low, because the band has gone for their tea and I have the floor until they come back. You want the one about the mermaid who danced at the Lantern Ballroom the summer the pier lost its lights. Very well. Pass me that glass.

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She came up through the drain under the bandstand on a Thursday, hair the colour of a bonfire gone to embers, and a top made of two purple scallop shells that Eddie the fishmonger's boy swore he'd seen fetch a shilling at the Sunday market. A brass anchor swung from one ear. Somebody's old net was wound round her, and it dripped on the sprung boards, and the girls at the rail pretended not to look while they looked.

Every night she asked Mr Pilling for a waltz. Every night she raised one arm behind her head, slow, the way the film stars did, and a jellyfish drifted at her shoulder like a lamp nobody had remembered to switch off. Teal beads swung across her chest and clicked together like a rosary. The dancers stepped politely round her, and nobody ever once trod on her tail.

Then one night old Harry, who swept the floor and had buried two wives and a dog, asked her where she went at dawn. She said back to the sea, but the net held her to the boards, and it always had, because she had cut her own knot to come up and the land had been waiting to tie it again.

In the morning the floor was dry and the net lay in a neat coil by the door. On the varnish sat one brass anchor, still warm. If you go down to the end of the pier tonight you can hear the band playing, and it's a waltz, and it has never once been in tune.