Traditional style colour tattoo of a mermaid with dark wavy hair, green scale tail and red flowers, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional mermaid with roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with dark wavy hair and a green flower tucked behind one ear sits at the centre of the design, with a teal shell covering her chest and a green scaled tail curling down. Two red flowers with yellow centres and green leaves frame her on either side. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid, flat colour fills and softer shading on the skin tones, set against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Mermaid Flower Rose Shell Scale Tail Hair Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gran's ovens ticked on at four every morning, and by half past the flour was over everything: the scales, the bell, my good boots. I was nineteen and sulking about it, because the shop on Harrow Street was the only place in town open before the buses, and nobody under fifty was meant to want that.

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The rose water lived on the top shelf in a green glass bottle with a mermaid painted on its label. Gran said a sailor called Teddy Marsh had left it behind when his boat came in for the last time, and that she'd kept it because the mermaid had the sense to look over her shoulder at the sea. I never saw anyone open it. We baked with orange flower and cardamom and plain honey, and the rose stayed where it was, like a promise nobody had made.

On the Thursday before the harvest fair, the bottle slipped from my floury hands and cracked against the tiled floor. The smell hit us both at once, sweet and sharp, and Gran went very still by the proving baskets. She didn't scold me. She knelt, picked out a curl of green glass with two fingers, and said, "Well, then. She wanted out."

We swept it up together before the dawn light reached the window. At the fair that Saturday, Gran sold every loaf we'd made with a dab of fresh rose folded into the dough, and the mermaid stayed on the shelf in a jam jar, still looking over her shoulder at the street.