Colour tattoo of a mermaid with purple and pink hair, a green tail and yellow starfish, surrounded by dots and small stars, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with starfish on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with flowing purple and pink hair holds two yellow starfish against her body, with her face partly turned and her arm across her chest. Her green scaled tail curls to the right, and small black dots and star shapes scatter around the figure. Bold colour fills and dark outlines sit on pale skin, with the design centred on the thigh.

Thigh Mermaid Starfish Star Hair Tail Dot

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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

Mind the bottom step, it's slick with the weed the council never sweeps. Now keep still, and I'll tell you about Marrow, who lived under the breakwater at Saltcombe with her hair full of pink and violet knots, and who had never once been asked what she thought of the sea.

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Her trouble started in March, when the harbour men dredged the channel and the starfish came up in the nets by the dozen, orange and yellow, drying stiff on the quay by noon. A gull took the first one. Marrow watched from the rocks with her green tail flicking over the wet shelf, and decided that a starfish left on stone was only a star that had lost its sky.

So each low tide she climbed the slipway with her arms full. She held two at a time against her chest, one under each elbow, the way you'd carry a pair of warm loaves, and she had to stop and rest often. Tobias Penhale, the fishmonger's boy, sat on the bollard eating crisps and told her she was daft. She said nothing. She carried them back to the pools one by one and let them down where the water was deep enough to hold their weight.

On the last evening of spring, Tobias came down with a bucket of his own. Two starfish lay in it, dead already. He tipped them out at her feet. "Thought you'd want them for your collection," he said, and his ears went red. Marrow lifted them with the care she'd learned, and looked at the boy for a long while. Then she swam out past the breakwater and let them go into the dark where no nets reached. Tobias still tells it wrong, saying she took the starfish. She didn't. She gave them back.