Watercolour-style mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair and a blue tail on the forearm, with loose ink splashes around her.

Watercolour mermaid on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mermaid sits facing away from the viewer, with long red hair blowing to one side and a blue scaled tail curving down the forearm. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft blue, orange and purple washes and a few dark grey shadows in the tail. The design fills the length of the forearm, with colour splashes spreading into the surrounding skin.

Forearm Mermaid Long hair Tail Fish scale Ink splash

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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

You find the painting in the back room of the chapel hall on the morning of the wedding, propped against a stack of folding chairs. Your aunt Morwenna painted it the summer before she left Skerrow, in watercolour on cartridge paper gone soft at the corners. A woman sits on a rock with her back to the room, red hair lifting off her shoulders as if someone has just called her name from the water, and her blue tail spills violet down the page into a wash of ink that nobody ever finished.

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The bride wants it moved to the table by the window, so you carry it out through the rain-wet car park, holding it flat like a tray. Halfway there a gust takes the top sheet and you nearly lose it to the puddles. Your fingers leave dark prints along the edge. Inside, the groom's father is reading his vows aloud to himself, tapping each line with a biro, and the ring box is somewhere in the pocket of a jacket that is not his.

When you set the painting down, the blue has run. The tail has crept a finger's width past the line she drew, and the orange in the hair has bled into the margin like breath on glass. Morwenna always said the sea does not respect a border. You stand there with wet hands, unsure whether to dry it or leave it, while the string quartet tunes up behind the door.

At the end of the afternoon the bride finds you on the harbour steps with the painting across your knees. She sits beside you without asking why. Below, the tide is coming in over the slipway, and the reflected hall lights break into blue and gold on the water. "Leave it," she says. "She'd want it wet." You do.