Full arm sleeve tattoo in a watercolour style showing a mermaid with flowing red hair and a green tail, with blue splashes, covering the upper arm and shoulder down to the forearm.

Watercolour mermaid full sleeve

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A mermaid with long, flowing red hair sits within a loose, painterly composition that extends from the shoulder down the arm. Her green tail sweeps down the forearm, surrounded by blue wash and scattered ink splatter that suggest water. The shading is soft and the linework is minimal, with colour fading into the skin in places, giving a watercolour effect.

Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Mermaid Hair Tail Water Splashes Watercolour

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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 lodger who painted the mermaid on the back stairwell paid three weeks in advance and left on the fourth morning with his easel folded under one arm and no forwarding address. Mrs Pargeter at number nine swore he had been a sailor. I told her sailors pay in coins, not in watercolour, and that the wall was the only thing he owed us.

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She started small, no bigger than a tea tray, a woman with hair like a struck match, perched on a rock he had only suggested with a few grey strokes. Then the damp came up through the cellar in February and her tail began to bleed into the plaster. Green ran down the skirting in long ribbons. Blue pooled beside the boot rack. Every morning I swept up flecks of colour from the lino, as if someone had shaken a loaded brush at the ceiling.

I thought about scrubbing her off. Instead I bought a tin of distemper and a fine sable brush and went over the outline, following his lines, so the damp could take what it wanted while the edges held. It took most of a winter. Guests complained about the cold and the smell of wet paint, and nobody complained about the mermaid, which I took as a kind of approval.

On the last night of March the tide came in higher than the sea wall had any right to allow, and spray found the back door. By morning the water had gone down and so had most of the blue. But her hair was still red, bright as a warning, and her tail still swept down the stairs toward the kitchen as though she had somewhere better to be. I left her where she was. Mrs Pargeter says she is the reason nobody has ever asked for a refund.