Colour tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a teal tail and surrounding bubbles, covering the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red-haired mermaid on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large mermaid sits within a loose circle of outlined bubbles, her long red hair flowing up and around her head with a small blue flower detail. Her teal tail is rendered with fluid, wavy lines and layered shading that fade softly into lighter tones. The bold dark outlines and soft colour washes fill the upper arm, with the tattoo's edges following the curve of the arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Mermaid Bubble Red hair Tail Flower Wave

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

The Woolwich ferry went down with its lamps still lit, and for forty years the river kept them burning under the silt. Nell Okonedo and I dived for copper on the sunken piers because the tide had taken everything else, and copper was what the sky-towers paid for. Our boat was a converted tender with a cracked hull and a tin sign that read PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE SEALS.

Keep reading

What stopped us was a woman painted on a bulkhead door. Someone had carried a tin of teal and a tin of rust-red down into the cabin, and she sat on the iron among the drifting bubbles of our own breath, her hair lifting up and around her head as if the water were still moving it. A small blue flower was tucked above one ear. The paint had held better than anything we had ever pulled from that river.

Nell wanted to prise the door off its hinges and sell her to a collector in the north. I said no. I had been on the river long enough to know that what it kept, it kept for a reason, and the copper could wait. We sat with our regulators off and watched the lamps flicker, and I thought about the ferryman's daughter who had painted her there, probably in a hurry, probably with the water already at her knees.

We left the door where it was. On the way up, Nell scratched a word into the slate we used for tide times, and when I asked her why, she said the river deserved a sign. The word was "Stay". I have not been back down since, but the boat still smells of paint and salt, and some nights I dream of a red-haired woman rising through the lamplight, slow as a tide, looking for the way out.