Two patches of blue, teal and purple scale tattoos with dark outlines and soft, watercolour-like shading on a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two mermaid scale patches on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

Two separate clusters of overlapping scale shapes sit on a person's leg, one higher up and one lower down. Each scale has a dark outline and soft, blended shading in teal, blue and purple, with faint splashes spreading past the edges. The plain skin and dark leather seat behind it keep the focus on the colour and the repeating scale pattern.

Thigh Scale Fish scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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Mr Pardoe came up the cliff path this morning pushing a barrow loaded with crates, and Mrs Ruddock signed for the lot before he'd got his cap off. Forty-odd tiles, all fish scale, glazed so they change colour when you turn them: teal in the middle, going to violet at the lip, with little runs of blue where the glaze pooled in the kiln. Mother said they were far too fine for a boarding house bathroom, and Mrs Ruddock said that was exactly why she'd bought them.

I laid the first patch above the bath myself, working from a chalk line on the plaster, and Mrs Ruddock laid the second down by the floor, on the side that catches the morning. We cut the edges with a wet saw borrowed from the Coopers and the dust went everywhere, so we're all grit and sea salt now. When the grout set, the scales looked less like tiles and more like something that had just come up out of the water and not yet decided to stay.

Pardoe let slip that the crates came off the Cressida's hold after she went onto the Mare Rocks in February. Nobody came to claim them, and the insurers wrote the cargo off. I haven't told Mrs Ruddock what he said, and I don't think I will. She sings to them when she thinks the house is asleep.

I left a gap between the two patches, about the width of a row of scales and the length of your hand. It's the only bare wall in the bathroom. Come home at Michaelmas and put something in it, even if it's only your name scratched in with a nail. The tiles will keep the rest.

Your loving sister, Nell