Watercolour-style mermaid tattoo with flowing red hair and a blue and purple tail, placed on the calf.

Watercolour mermaid tattoo on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid with long red hair sits on a blue scaled tail that curls down the leg, with a sweeping blue fin at the base. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft blue, red and purple washes bleeding outward and small splatter marks around the figure. The design fills the length of the calf against a plain skin background, with the ink mostly colour and some dark purple shading.

Calf Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Fin Splatter

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

The big top went up again at Hexham and the rain has not stopped since. I have been sat in the back of the caravan with the paint tins lined up on the step, trying to make the mermaid behind the swing boats come right. Mr Okonedo wants her blue to match the sea he remembers from Margate, and I keep telling him that sea was never that colour. Only the light made it so, at six in the evening, when everyone had given up on the rides.

Here is the trouble. Watercolour does what it likes once it is wet. I dropped a bit of rose madder on the flat last night and it ran down through the blue like a hand looking for a way out, and I stood there with my brush dripping and thought, well, that is the tail's first fin, then. So I let it bleed. Mr Okonedo came round at ten with his torch and said it looked like a fire under the water. He was not wrong. Some of the girls on the dodgems have asked me to paint a mermaid on their arms, and I have said no, because I can't yet tell where the paint stops and the person begins.

I am sending you the sketch I did on the back of a ticket stub. Keep it. When we pull out for Carlisle on Thursday I will leave the flat rolled in the van, and you can tell me how she looks when you get to see her, with her hair going up in the wind the way I drew it. Tell me whether the splatters look like rain or like sea spray. I can never decide.

Love, Bet