Colour neo-traditional tattoo on an arm showing a red-haired cartoon mermaid in profile with grey beads, beside a large teal rose with green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red-haired mermaid and teal rose on an arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A red-haired cartoon mermaid in profile is shown against a string of grey beads, with a pink and white top and freckled cheek detail. Beside her, a large teal rose with yellow highlights and green leaves sits at the top of the frame. Bold black outlines and smooth colour fills define the design, which is photographed outdoors on a tiled pavement with a person wearing a floral top and lace trim in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, lass, because Ada Pattinson's rose is where this starts, and you'll not get the end of it standing up. Her father worked the Harker seam for thirty-one years and came up every shift grey to the eyebrows. Nobody in Shield Row had ever seen a rose the colour of the sea off Whitby on a good day, but Ada swore she'd grown it from a cutting a coastal lass gave her on the charabanc outing, and she kept it in a jam jar on the sill where the pit dust couldn't get at it.

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Every Sunday she carried her grandmother's string of jet beads down to the beck and sat on the wall above the weir. She'd drop one bead in at a time and tell the water what the manager had said that week, because the water never repeated it to anybody. Her hair was the red of a fox in November, and the beck men said she had a mermaid's temper, which was a compliment, though they only ever said it behind the lamp room door.

The spring the seam flooded, the winding wheel stood still for nine days. On the tenth morning the beads came back down the beck, one by one, caught in the weir grille and laid out on the flags like a rosary somebody had prayed on. Ada knelt and counted them, and the last one was missing. Her father never came up that day, but the rose on the sill opened a petal wider, and she said that was him telling her he'd been to see the sea.

So when folk ask me why there's a mermaid curled round the beads on his tin, I tell them it's no mermaid at all. It's Ada, keeping count.

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