Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a teal tail on the left side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red-haired mermaid on a side ribcage

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A full-colour tattoo of a red-haired mermaid curls down the side of the ribcage, her arm raised above her head and her teal tail sweeping toward the hip. The bold outlines and smooth shading suggest a cartoon-like illustration with soft gradients in the tail and hair. The photo is taken from the side at an angle, with a dark top above the tattoo and jeans below, and a blurred background.

Neo-trad Ribs Mermaid Hair Tail Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gulls had gone quiet over Pell Street Wharf by the time Marnie Oake climbed down the iron ladder with a crate of unclaimed things on her hip. Her tail knocked against the rungs. Nobody on the quay looked twice at a mermaid after midnight, not in a city that had been losing its fishermen since the cranes came in, and nobody asked why she kept a lost-property shelf under the third arch.

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Tonight the shelf held a brass key, a child's wellington, two wedding rings nobody had come back for, and a tin of boiled sweets rattling with sea water. She was sorting them by the light of a paraffin lamp when the lad from the chip shop came sliding along the slipway, holding out a silver locket on a broken chain. "Found it in the net," he said. "Thought it might be yours." It was not hers. Inside was a photograph of a woman with the same red hair as Marnie, though younger, and eyes like a storm coming in.

She turned it over. Someone had scratched a name into the back with a nail: Ada. Her grandmother's name, the one the sea had taken off the Cormorant in the winter of the great gale, the one nobody on the quay spoke any more. Marnie felt the cold of the water climb her spine like a hand.

She thanked the lad, gave him a sweet, and when he was gone she lifted the locket high above her head and let it drop through the gap in the wharf boards. "Go on, then," she said to the black water. Something tugged twice on the chain before it slipped under, and the tide, for once, went out quietly.