Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a mermaid with a flowing orange and red tail and blue splashes, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour mermaid on upper back

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A mermaid with a pale, outlined figure and long flowing hair curls across the upper back, with her fin sweeping down towards the lower edge of the frame. Thin black linework defines the body and tail, while loose orange, red and blue washes spread outward like watercolour, with small blue specks scattered around the tail. The composition is diagonal, with the tattoo filling most of the shoulder blade area and the skin lit evenly.

Back Shoulder Mermaid Tail Watercolour splashes Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marit had the lamp trimmed before the gulls had finished their evening quarrel, because the new keeper at Skerry Point had said that a lamp left cold on a winter night was a lamp that drowned somebody. She climbed the iron stair with a rag of oil in her pocket and found the glass already sooted over, a red smear on the lens like a thumbprint on a sunset.

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Below the rocks the sea was doing what it did in January, throwing itself at the foot of the cliff as if it had a grudge against the stone. Marit had grown up on that water. Her mother had said the mermaids of the Skerry came in with the first frost and went out again when the herring turned, and that a sensible girl never looked at them longer than it took to count to nine.

She counted to nine that night and then, because she was nobody's sensible girl, she counted again. A woman sat on the black rock below the light, her hair streaming out over the spray in long ribbons the colour of a fire going down. Her tail curled behind her, fins ragged as burnt paper, and where the water broke over her it fizzed orange and blue like a struck match. She was singing, or perhaps it was only the wind through the gap in the reef.

Marit cleaned the glass until her knuckles bled into the oil. When she finally looked down again the rock was bare, but there were blue specks drying on the iron rail, and when she licked one from her thumb it tasted of salt and cinders. The next morning the harbourmaster's boat came in short one crewman and full of the strange, warm light the Skerry sometimes gave off, and Marit kept the lamp lit every night after that, just in case she was wanted back.