Traditional style flash drawing of a pin-up mermaid with brown hair, a red hibiscus, a shell top and a teal scaled tail, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up mermaid with a shell top

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A pin-up mermaid with long brown hair and a red flower in it sits with one arm raised behind her head. She wears a shell top and has decorative patterns drawn on her torso, and her tail is teal with scale detail and dark outlines. Bold black linework and flat, saturated fills give it a classic traditional look on a plain white background.

Traditional Mermaid Pin-up Hibiscus Shell Scale Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shell top had come unstuck again by the second waltz, so Dolly Fenner sent me up the ladder with a pot of glue and a mouthful of pins. Below us the Marine Ballroom at Saltcombe was packed to the rafters, the brass band sweating through a foxtrot, and nobody looked up except the girl I had come up the ladder to see.

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I had painted the backdrop that spring, a sea-coloured curtain of a mermaid stretched across the stage, and she had been wrong from the first brushstroke. Mr Abney wanted a pin-up, all red lips and a come-hither glance, so I gave her a hibiscus for the hair and a pair of shells to keep the wind off. The tail was the trouble. I mixed teal three times before the scales looked like they had been wet in moonlight rather than painted on a cake tin lid.

Dolly took the ladder herself and told me to go and dance. I didn't. I stood by the open doors where the spray came in off the promenade and watched the painted mermaid catch the lamplight, her ink lines black and steady, while the dancers swirled past her like weed in a tide.

At closing, when the chairs were stacked and the band had gone home, I found a single wet scale on the boards below the curtain, bright as a sixpence. I pressed it into my palm and kept it. The next summer I painted her tail a shade darker, because I had learned she liked to be a little damp at the edges.