Fine line mermaid tattoo seen from behind on the forearm, with black linework and teal watercolour splashes on the scaled tail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with teal wash on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid sits facing away from the viewer, with long dark hair falling over one shoulder and a scaled tail curling beneath her. The linework is fine and sketchy in black, with soft shading on the scales and fins. Teal and turquoise watercolour-style washes sit behind and within the tail, giving a mixed black and colour finish on the forearm.

Fine line Forearm Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Fin Watercolour

Find an artist for this

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

Pass me the blue, the proper one, not that tin the chandler sold us for the boats. It goes on thin and dries grey if you so much as breathe on it. Our Ada always said the sea wasn't grey, it was only tired, and you had to lay the colour on like you meant to wake it.

Keep reading

Nobody in Porthleven believed the story about the girl off the Lizard. Three winters back the trawler Mary Kettle came in with her nets full of nothing but weed and a cracked lamp, and her skipper swore a woman sat on the rail at the turn of the tide, combing her hair with a comb made of bone. He went to fetch his cousin to see, and when they came back the rail was bare, only a wet handprint drying on the varnish and a smell of ink.

I went down to the harbour the next morning with my sketchbook and a jar of wash, meaning to paint her for the Institute window. I drew her with her back to me, hair pulled over one shoulder, her tail curled under like a cat asleep on a step. The lines came quick and loose, and when I brushed the teal across them the paper drank it up and went soft. She looked less like a warning and more like someone waiting for her name to be called.

Ada came down with her shawl and looked a long time. Then she took the brush from me, dipped it in the deepest colour and laid one stroke across the tail. 'There,' she said. 'Now she's got somewhere to swim.' The skipper's cousin still says the water in that window moves when the sun is low. I've never told him he's wrong.