Black and grey traditional tattoo of a skeletal mermaid with long hair and a fish tail on an upper arm, with a peony above it.

Skeleton mermaid with peony on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeletal mermaid with long flowing hair and a scaled fish tail is tattooed on the upper arm, with a peony and leaves above it. The work uses bold outlines with solid black fill, stippled shading on the hair and tail, and fine detail on the ribcage and skull. The image is entirely black and grey, shown in a close side view against a soft, blurred background.

Traditional Botanical Upper arm Mermaid Skeleton Skull Peony Leaves Scale Hair Fish tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They took the bones out of the mere the spring the water dropped a full arm's length, and nobody in Cold Ashby could say whose they were. The reeds had grown through the ribs. The skull still had a comb of mother-of-pearl pushed into its hair, which the children wanted, and the old woman at the forge said no one was to touch it.

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Her name was Ilse, or so the eldest said, because she had sung in a voice like wet stone before she stopped. The village laid her in the churchyard by the east wall, and the vicar's wife planted a peony over her, red and heavy-headed. Every June the petals fell on the flat stone and the rain carried them into the grass.

Then the mere gave its water back in autumn, and the reeds came up again, and with them a tail of scales lying in the mud where the bones had been. Tomas Hale, who had carried the coffin, swore he saw it flick. He went down to the water with a bucket of salt and a knife and did not come home for three days.

When he did, his arm was inked from shoulder to elbow with a fish that curled round the bone, its ribs white against the black. He would not say who had done the work. He only told the children to leave the mere alone, and to keep the peonies pruned, because she liked them in flower and she always knew who had cut them.