Traditional colour tattoo of a pin-up mermaid with dark hair, a polka-dot flower and a red shell top, with a red-to-green tail, on the thigh.

Pin-up mermaid with shell top

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A pin-up mermaid sits with one arm raised behind her head, her long dark hair swept over one shoulder and a polka-dot flower tucked behind her ear. Bold black outlines define the figure, with grey shading in the hair and a soft gradient of red, blue and green across the scaled tail. The design fills the frame against plain skin, with a patch of denim visible at the top left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ruth had been perched on the pier rail since six, her hair pinned up against the damp, and Walter had given up asking her to keep still. He had a brush in one hand and a tin of red lead in the other, and the bathing-costume shop on the Parade wanted its window done by Friday. The owner had asked for a mermaid to make the sunbathers stop and stare.

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'Not a fish,' Ruth said. 'I'm not having a fish with my face on it.'

'She's not you. Mermaids are made up.'

'Then make her up properly.' She lifted one arm to scratch behind her ear and tucked a spotted ribbon back into her hair, the one she wore to chapel on Sundays and to annoy her mother every other day. 'Put a bow on her. And give her a proper pink shell top, not a bit of seaweed.'

So he did. He worked the outline in black ink first, one unbroken line from wrist to hip, the way his master had taught him. Then the grey shading in the hair, heavy as the light went. When he reached the tail he stopped, because the tail was the hard part. Red at the top where the sun still caught it, blue through the middle, green at the fin like the water off the breakwater on a calm evening. He ran the colours on the palette until they blended without a seam.

The window was finished on the Friday and people stood in front of it all summer. When the shop closed in September, Walter found the board propped against the back wall, the paint scuffed, the ribbon still bright. Ruth had married a lifeboatman by then and moved up the coast. He kept the sketch folded in his apron pocket, and on wet afternoons the green fin still caught the light.

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