Black and grey mermaid tattoo on the forearm, with a starfish in her hair, long flowing hair and a scaled tail curling below her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with starfish on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid sits with her tail curled beneath her, her long hair flowing outwards with a starfish tucked into it, and small fish and a starfish scattered around the design. The linework is bold and defined, with the scales and fin shaded using fine stippling and soft grey gradients. The piece is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and sits centrally on the forearm against a plain, out of focus background.

Blackwork Dotwork Forearm Mermaid Starfish Fish Hair Tail Star Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Trewin had been taking the back stairs since Whitsun, two at a time, with his cap in one hand and his pipe unlit in the other. I found him on the landing the morning the tide went out further than anyone in Skerrow could remember, standing at the sash window with his sleeve rolled past the elbow. Under the skin of his forearm a woman sat on a rock with her tail curled beneath her and her hair spread across the sea like weed. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the bay, where the sand had gone to a silver plain and the fishing boats lay tipped on their keels like dropped shoes.

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"She's the reason I came here," he said, which was the first thing he had ever told me that wasn't about the price of coal. He opened his palm. A starfish sat there, orange gone the colour of old pennies. "My sister wore one in her hair the summer she walked out past the groyne. Said the sea would know her by it. I had her put on me in Ostend the year after, by a man with a machine that sounded like a sewing kettle. I never once thought the sea knew anybody."

So at dusk, while Mrs Pell was counting spoons in the kitchen, I walked him down to the groyne. He went slowly, one hand on the rail, and when we reached the last slick step he knelt on the weed as though at a graveside and set the starfish face up on a flat stone. The water was already coming back in thin silver fingers. Neither of us spoke. We watched it reach the stone and lift the starfish away, turning it once so its arms pointed the way it had come.

Mr Trewin's room was empty the next morning, the bed made tight and the window shut. On the sill lay his pipe, cold and unlit, and beside it a single curl of long dark hair that had not been there before, wound round the stem like a ribbon. I have kept it in the drawer with my good gloves ever since, and some evenings, when the tide is high, I swear I can hear the harbour bell ringing for a boat that never comes in.