Colour traditional tattoo of a mermaid with red roses and yellow flowers on the outer leg, with a bird at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional mermaid with roses on a leg

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A mermaid sits on a rock with long dark hair, surrounded by red roses, yellow flowers, green leaves and a small bird at the top left. The bold black outlines are filled with solid red, green, yellow and brown ink, with shading on the skin tones and scales. The design curves diagonally across the limb, with the ornate fish tail extending down towards the lower edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm,

Keep reading

The tide took the lower causeway again on Tuesday, so the carrier boat from Saltmarsh Quay has been late, and this letter goes out with the fish cart instead. Forgive the smudges. Brother Oswy has been mixing paints for the new refectory panels, and I have been helping him, which is how I came to be standing in the scriptorium at midnight with a mermaid's tail in my lap.

It is not a true mermaid, you understand. It is the figurehead from the Marigold, the wreck the storm threw onto the Scar in February. The timber was salvaged by the parish and given to us for firewood, but Oswy saw the carving and asked the prior if he might keep it. She is a sorry thing now, her hair worn to grain, one arm gone. Yet someone long ago painted her in bold black lines, filled with red and green and a yellow like cut straw, and the paint has held better than the wood.

Oswy wants to copy her exactly for the panel. He says the sea-folk of the old tales would never have sat so plainly on their rock, with roses at their shoulder and a little bird perched in the corner as if it had been told to wait. I said the sailors had no doubt wanted their own luck painted on. He laughed and said the sailors had wanted something to look at while they were drowning.

I have decided the panel will show her facing the sea, not the shore. Brother Oswy thinks this is heresy. Tell the abbot I will confess it at Michaelmas, if he asks.

Brother Edric

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