Fine line outline tattoo of a mermaid in rainbow colours with a small blue bird, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow outline mermaid on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a mermaid with long flowing hair and a curled tail, drawn in a single continuous outline. Each part of the design uses a different colour, running from red and orange through yellow and green to blue and purple, with a small blue bird and a yellow outlined shape beside the tail. The linework is thin and even on smooth skin, and the photograph is taken close up against a plain background.

Fine line Upper arm Mermaid Bird Rainbow Outline Hair Tail

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

You climb the spiral stair with lamp oil still on your sleeves, counting the iron steps because counting is easier than thinking about the sea below. Your father's boots are by the door where he left them the night the lens cracked. Nobody has told you yet that the inspector from the lights board is coming on Friday to decide whether the light stays lit.

Keep reading

The great lens is a bell of prisms, and when the sun gets behind it the beam breaks into the colours you once tried to copy in pencil on the back of tide tables. Red at the crown, then orange, yellow, green, down to blue and violet at the base. Your mother said the mermaid carved on the lantern rail was made by a sailor who had drowned for a week and come back wanting to be remembered in every colour at once. You never believed her, but you never painted over her either.

On Thursday a blue-grey kittiwake lands on the rail with a strand of green weed in its beak and drops it at your boot. Tangled in the weed is a brass collar from the lens mount, warm from the sun, the very piece that went missing in the storm. You know its shape because you have traced it a hundred times on paper, and it slides into the gap as if it had only been waiting for your hand.

When you turn the bolt the whole lens wakes and throws its colours across the water in one long stripe that runs straight to the rocks, where the inspector's boat is already coming about. He can see the light now. You tell yourself it was the bird. You are not sure it was not the mermaid, who has always looked as though she knows exactly where the rocks are.