Watercolour-style tattoo of a red-haired mermaid with a teal tail on the side of a ribcage, with black linework and splashes of colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour mermaid on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A red-haired mermaid sits on a rock with a purple shell top and a teal tail, drawn with loose black outlines. Soft red, teal and grey washes spread beyond the linework, giving a watercolour effect. The design is centred on the side of the ribs, with a hand visible at the edge of the frame.

Ribs Mermaid Red hair Tail Rock Watercolour splashes

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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

Mind the kettle, and sit where the lamp can reach you, because I'm telling this one the way my mother told it, with the wet still on it. Porthwen, the summer the lifeboat was painted grey. Nell Carrick sat on the Black Stack every evening with her hair down, red as a fox come in from the rain, and the fishermen said she was singing to the gulls. It's a daft thing to say about a girl, but they said it anyway.

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Her father kept the chandlery on Quay Street and wanted her behind the counter counting rope and tin hooks, not out on the rocks talking to the tide. She'd tie a scallop shell across her chest with a length of violet ribbon and wade past the breakwater as if it were a garden gate. Some evenings there was a green tail on the water, bright as bottle glass, and then only the foam.

The autumn the Mary Ellen went down off the Scar, Nell was on the Stack with a paintbox, daubing red and teal onto the grey stone, and she didn't look round when her father shouted. The spray took the paint off the rock by morning. What stayed was a ring of wet grey where she'd sat, and the Mary Ellen's crew came ashore dry, every one of them, with sand in their boots and not a drop of sea on their coats.

So if you're going down to the harbour tonight, take a shell in your pocket and don't argue with the gulls.