Watercolour-style mermaid tattoo with red hair, a teal tail and black linework across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour mermaid on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A seated mermaid with flowing red hair, a purple shell top and a teal tail is drawn in loose black linework. Red, teal and grey washes spread beyond the outlines like watercolour, with a grey wash beneath her tail. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against pale skin, with the composition arranged diagonally across the ribs.

Ribs Mermaid Hair Shell Tail Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Ellen Dawe could say when Tom Pardoe started painting on the back of the spoiled order sheets, only that by the time we raised the Dogger the galley wall above the potato sacks was papered with them, held up by strips of tape that never quite stuck in the damp. Most were gulls, a few were the skipper's dog, and one was a woman sitting on a wet rock with her tail flicked out behind her like a pennant. That was the one Haines kept looking at over his tea.

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"Who's she supposed to be?" he asked on the third morning, when the sea had gone the colour of pewter and the cups were sliding across the table on their own. Tom shrugged and scraped the last of the teal from the pan lid. "Nobody. The red was left over from the buoy marks." "Doesn't look like nobody." Tom had only the two colours left by then, and the cocoa tin he used for water had gone the colour of the sea off Flamborough, so every brushful came out a shade murkier than the last.

The grey under her tail he laid down last, on a rolling afternoon when the paint ran off the bench and across the rock, and he let it run, because the running looked like water finding its own way down. Haines pinned that sheet above the sink while Tom was on deck with the nets, and nobody took it down.

When we came in to Grimsby the paper had gone soft at the corners from the wet. Haines folded it into his oilskin without a word, and I've thought since that he was the only man aboard who ever bothered to ask her name.