Watercolour-style tattoo of a mermaid with flowing red hair and a purple shell top, with a blue splash below, on the forearm.

Watercolour mermaid with red hair on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid sits on a blue watercolour splash, leaning back with her long red hair sweeping upwards and around her. The fine black outline is loose and sketchy, with soft pale skin tones and red and purple washes that bleed past the lines. The composition is centred on the forearm, with the blue splash grounding the figure at the base and the red hair flowing up to the top of the design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the herring boats came back to Scarra low in the water, and every autumn Ada Penhallow walked the slip at low tide looking for her husband's cap. She found the cap the year the sea took him, but not the thing she was really looking for. What she found instead was a strand of hair as long as her arm, red as rust, tangled in the bladderwrack below the skerry.

Keep reading

The old women on the island had a saying for it. The sea-wife combs her hair on the flat rock when the tide is out, and if you bring her something she has lost, she will tell you which way the shoal has gone. Ada had nothing of the sea's to give back except her own hair. She cut it off at the nape with the gutting knife, wound it into a loop, and laid it on the rock at dusk while the gulls quarrelled over the last of the bait.

In the morning there was a shell where the hair had been, lilac and ribbed, with a crack along one edge and sand packed into the crack. Ada carried it home in her apron pocket and set it on the windowsill beside the lamp. The boats came in full that winter, and the next, and no man from Scarra went under on the north run again. When the wind turned, she could hear the shell hum faintly, like someone at the bottom of a well still combing out a knot.

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