A mermaid tattoo in grey-green ink on a preserved piece of skin, displayed in a sealed glass jar, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Preserved mermaid tattoo on skin in a jar

Traditional · Black and grey · Photo

A preserved piece of skin bearing a grey-green tattoo of a mermaid with long hair, raised arms and a scaled tail, shown in a sealed glass jar with a dark metal lid. The linework is bold and solid with simple shading in the scales, typical of older flash-style designs. The image is a studio photograph on a plain white background, with the specimen centred and well lit.

Traditional Mermaid Tail Scale Hair Skin Jar

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the candle, for Brother Anselm will have your ears if you drip wax on the reliquary shelf. No, not that jar. The one at the back, with the lid gone green as a pond. That is the mermaid, and she has a tale longer than the Psalter.

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In my grandfather's time a collier called the Marigold limped into Lowestoft with half her crew down with the flux. Among the living was a boy named Tobias Crane, who had a mermaid pricked on his forearm in a Wapping back room, done with lamp soot and a sailmaker's needle. He wanted her to look up at the sun, so the artist raised her arms over her head, and that is how she has stayed, hands together above her hair, ever since. Tobias died in our infirmary in the grey before Lent. The prior, arguing with himself about whether a sinful picture ought to lie in consecrated ground, had the piece cut away and kept, and that was the end of the argument.

Now here is the strange part. Brother Ruel, who kept the infirmary lamps, swore the jar was turned every morning to face the east window, though no one had touched it. He was a sceptic about most things, but he took to sleeping with his door open so he could hear it. One night in March he heard the glass knock softly against the shelf, like a fish nosing at a net, and found the lid unscrewed and the water inside gone cold and salt.

We never did find out how a jar of spirit came to smell of the sea. The prior sealed it again with wax, wrote a line in the ledger, and told Ruel to stop listening. So if you ever come to this room at dusk, do not lift the lid. She is still waiting for the sun to answer her.