Watercolour-style tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a blue and purple tail on the forearm.

Watercolour mermaid on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid with flowing red hair sits with her back partly turned, her tail curling down the forearm. The linework is fine and dark, with soft watercolour-style washes of red, blue, purple and pink, and a few scales shaded in the tail. The design fills the length of the forearm against a pale background.

Forearm Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring had gone off the Skelder grounds that spring, and by May the boats came back in empty, so the men of the town blamed the weather, the old German mines, and then the woman in the water. Nobody knew her name. Old Amos Rawle said she sat on the flat rock below the lighthouse and combed her red hair with a bone comb, and that anyone who looked at her long enough would owe her something.

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Tom Rawle was nineteen and did not believe a word of it. He rowed out alone one evening with a lamp and a coil of net, meaning to see for himself. The sea was flat and pink. She was there on the stone with her back half turned to him, her tail curled down into the green water, and she was singing in a voice like wet rope being hauled. He did not look at her face for long. He looked at the comb in her hand, and the net in his boat, and said nothing at all.

'You want the fish back,' she said, without turning round. 'Then take them. But I want your father's net cut.' He told her the net was his father's and the fish belonged to the whole town. She laughed, and the spray from her tail caught the lamplight like broken glass. 'Then you will owe me the thing you cannot name,' she said, and slid off the stone without a splash.

The herring came back in June, so thick the nets split. Tom never rowed past the lighthouse again. In August his mother found a bone comb wrapped in blue wool on the doorstep, and a single purple scale stuck to the inside of the tin where he kept his tobacco. He still opens that tin some mornings and counts the fish he did not catch.