Watercolour-style mermaid tattoo with flowing pink hair and a blue and green tail, placed on the side of the ribs.

Watercolour mermaid on the side ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid with long, windswept pink hair sits in a curved pose, her tail sweeping down and across the frame. Thin dark outlines define the figure and tail fins, while the body and tail are filled with soft blue, green, purple and pink washes. Black splashes and small droplets around the figure add a loose, painterly composition.

Ribs Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Splash Bubble 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

Mind the lock, you lot, and sit where the lamp can reach. Aye, that's it. Now, the girl with the red hair. Nobody on the Thrale Cut ever saw her come up out of the water, only the spray of her going down, blue as a kingfisher's back, and the bubbles she left behind like coins somebody had tossed for luck. Old Hal Dunmore swore he'd seen her on the towpath in March, dripping and cross, asking the way to the nearest paint merchant.

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Hal kept the narrowboat Patience below the sluice gates, and that winter he was painting her hull in a hurry because the lockkeeper's wife was waiting on a sign. He had a pot of ink on the cabin step, and when the wind caught the door it went over, a black splash the size of a hat across the boards. The mermaid came up through the reeds that same night, sat on the step with her tail hanging in the cut, and said the river had gone grey on her. She'd been down there so long she couldn't remember what colour the sea was.

Hal gave her the last of his cadmium pink and a brush with a split handle, and she painted herself out of the cold. Her hair she did first, long and wild, streaming the way it does when a barge goes too fast under the bridge. Then the scales, blue on green, then the purple she mixed from the ink, which is why the water goes dark near the sluice to this day. She never got her tail right, mind. She kept saying the fins needed more wind in them.

So when the reeds turn pink in March, that's her, still up the cut, mending the colour she borrowed. And if you lean over the rail at dusk, you'll see the bubbles rise and stop, rise and stop, the way a person does when they've decided not to say the rest.