Rainbow-coloured mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair and a blue to green tail, sitting on the upper arm.

Rainbow mermaid on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid in profile with long hair that moves from red through orange and yellow, and a tail that curls down the arm from blue to green. The linework is soft and blended rather than hard-edged, so the colours fade into one another. Colour ink dominates the design, and the tattoo is set against plain skin with the woman's shoulder and dark strap visible behind it.

Upper arm Mermaid Hair Tail Wave

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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

Dear Nell, the tide went so far out this morning that the fishing boats sat on the mud like dropped shoes, and I was down the slipway with the dye vats when she came up in the gap between the pilings. I thought at first it was a bundle of weed, then I saw her hair, the red of madder root going to saffron at the ends, lifting on the water as if there were a wind only she could feel. Her tail was blue as the deep channel where the ferry goes, then green as the weed on the steps.

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She watched me stir the cloth for a long while before she spoke. Our water was wrong, she said, too much lime from the quarry, and that was why the reds went brown and the blues went grey. She told me to bring the vat down at the turn of the tide and let the wool sit in the seawater overnight. I thought she was mad, but Mam always said the sea knows more about colour than any dyer in Penzance, so I tried it. The reds came up like a fire on a hillside and the blues ran into the greens so softly you could not find the line between them.

I took the first bolt down to the bottom step last night, as she asked, and left it folded on the stone. This morning the step was bare, and the tide had taken the cloth. In its place, lying on the wet weed, was a single long strand of red hair, tied in a knot around the iron ring. I have kept it in my apron pocket all day, and it is still warm from the sun.

Write back soon and tell me what the sea is like off Lisbon. I have not yet decided whether to tell Mam.

Your loving sister, Bea