Black and grey ornamental mermaid tattoo with a flower on the outer thigh, filled with patterned detail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mermaid and flower on the thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A long mermaid figure with a finned tail wraps from the upper thigh down towards the knee, with a large ornamental flower and swirling leaves beside her upper body. The linework is bold and the interior is filled with dense patterning, including dots, scrolls and paisley-like motifs, with shading that gives depth. The ink is entirely black and grey on a smooth skin surface, and the photo is framed closely on the leg with white bedding behind.

Blackwork Botanical Thigh Mermaid Flower Swirl Leaves Paisley

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

The mermaid came up in the net on the third haul, lying in the mesh like a dropped ribbon. Nell Tregarthen had hauled mackerel off that cod-end for twenty years and knew the weight of a bad catch, but this one barely weighed a thing. Her father, at the tiller of the Little Sallie, swore under his breath and told her to cut her loose before the gulls got wind of it.

Keep reading

Nell didn't cut. She sat on the wet boards with her knife in her lap and worked the twine free instead, one knot at a time, the way she'd been taught to unpick a snagged mesh. Every knot was patterned. Dots ran along the tail in rows, scrolls curled off the fins like fiddleheads, and on the upper arm a paisley of tiny stitches turned over and over itself. Whoever had made the net, or the creature, had taken their time.

When the last knot gave, the mermaid didn't flop. She lay in the bilge water, flicked her fin once, and pressed a palm flat against the side of the boat as if testing the timber. Then she looked up at Nell with a face that had nothing of the harbour in it, and tapped the netting with one finger. The squares where she'd lain were printed now, each one inked with the same swirling marks, as though the sea had been practising a pattern and finally got it right.

Her father would never believe it. Nell folded the net that evening on the quay, and the marks stayed, dark as oil and stitched to every knot. Next morning the Little Sallie came in heavy with mackerel, and nobody on the fleet could say why the catch had turned. Only Nell noticed that a sea-pink had bloomed on the stern-post beside the boat's name, and she did not repaint it.