Colour traditional tattoo of a red-haired mermaid in a shell top, with a skull under a spider web above her head and waves below, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with skull on an arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red-haired mermaid in a green scallop-shell top sits against dark clouds, with a skull beneath a spider web above her head. She holds a golden shell, and green and yellow waves curl around her tail at the bottom of the design. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat areas of red, orange, green and yellow and soft shading on the skin tones.

Traditional Forearm Mermaid Skull Spider web Cloud Wave Shell Red hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Pellow kept the mermaid in a zinc tub behind the big top, and every evening the water in it sank another finger's width. The showman sold the spare by the bucket to pay the farrier. Nobody in the county had seen the sea since the wet summer the river took the second wagon, yet the handbills still promised a mermaid from the Atlantic deeps. Her name was Ada Vell. She had been a dressmaker's girl before she was a wonder.

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The skull came with the fortune tent. Old Ysolde had died in February with her cards in her lap and her crystal wrapped in a red scarf, and the only things she left the company were a brass-rimmed skull and a spider she had kept in a jar for forty years, which nobody would let go. Ada asked for the skull on the night before the last fair. She set it on the tub's rim, where the web it had gathered caught the lamplight like a second sky.

The golden shell was a hairbrush case from a dead woman's trunk, gilded by a boy with a scrap of leaf. Ada held it up to the lantern and told the farmers' children that anyone who blew through it would hear the tide come in. Most of them laughed. One small boy, Tom Hebble, did not. He blew, and the wind off the Fens came round the tent pole with a sound like surf, and Mother Pellow stopped counting buckets.

They found the tub empty in the morning, dry except for a wet ring where her tail had lain, and a trail of salt running under the canvas towards the marsh. The company moved on without her. Tom swears the tide came up that autumn over the fairground at Holbeach, and that a red-haired woman sat on the sea wall with a golden shell in her lap, combing the brine from her hair, and never once looked back at the handbills.