Black and grey realism tattoo of a reclining mermaid with a scaled tail curling above her, across the side ribs of a torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Reclining mermaid tattoo on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A reclining mermaid with long wavy hair lies across the side of the torso, her scaled tail curling upward and over the figure. The tattoo uses soft grey shading and fine detail on the scales, hair and pearl necklace, with faint sketchy background lines behind her. Two photographs show the same piece from different angles, with no colour ink present.

Realism Ribs Mermaid Scale Tail Long hair Pearl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The landlady's rules were pinned to the back of the door, under the brass hook for umbrellas, and the first of them was that the grey engraving in the front parlour was not to be taken down. You read it twice before carrying your case up the stairs, and by the third night you had stopped reading the rules and started reading her instead. The engraving showed a mermaid stretched across the sand, her tail lifted over her body like a question, a string of pearls lying at her throat, and her hair spilling out into the faint sketched lines of the tide. Mrs Tregenza said her grandmother had bought it from a sailor for the price of a week's board, and that nobody in the house ever sat with their back to it.

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On the fourth night you couldn't sleep, so you took a pot of tea down to the parlour and sat in the armchair across from the frame. The lamp made the scales look wet. You traced the air in front of the glass with one finger, following the curl of the tail, and found that the background lines seemed to have shifted, the horizon sitting a little higher than it had the evening before. Mrs Tregenza came in behind you in her dressing gown, saw where you were sitting, and didn't tell you to move.

"Those pearls were real once," she said. "Pawned in 1931 to pay the coal man. She's been wanting them back ever since." You laughed, and she didn't, and she went back up the stairs without another word.

In the morning the throat in the engraving was bare. The pearls had gone, and on the sand beside the frame lay one small grey bead, still damp. You put it on the mantelpiece beside the clock. When you looked back from the garden gate, the sea behind her had crept up nearly a finger's width, and her tail seemed to curl a little tighter around the house.