Mermaid tattoo ideas, meaning and designs

Three mermaids, three budgets

Decide which one you want before you start looking at artists, because almost nobody does all three well. Traditional work and realism are close to opposite skills, and the artists who are good at one usually say so plainly when you ask about the other.

Where the mermaid came from

Homer's sirens were bird women, and Greek vase painting shows them with wings and clawed feet. The fish tailed woman is a later European figure, and by the Middle Ages she was carved into churches as a warning about temptation. Sailors' lore kept the dangerous reading, where a mermaid sighting was an omen of a storm. Most of the sightings that got written down were manatees or dugongs.

Two things made the friendlier version. Andersen published The Little Mermaid in 1837 and gave her a sacrifice and a longing. Then American tattooers, Norman Collins among them, working out of Honolulu until his death in 1973, turned her into a pin up with a shell top, a flipped tail and an anchor to sit on. Those two sources are why a mermaid can mean temptation on one arm and homesickness on another.

Faces and scales, the two things that fail

A realistic face needs about 5 cm of face, not 5 cm of mermaid, before the eyes, nose and mouth have room to be a person instead of a smudge. Below that the features merge during healing and the portrait ages into a grey oval. A traditional face is drawn with a handful of confident lines and reads fine at 3 cm, which is exactly why traditional tattooing drew faces that way.

Scales, hair and water, in order of difficulty

• Scales under 4 mm merge into a texture, so vary the scale size down the tail and leave gaps
• Hair needs clumps with negative space between them, never strand by strand, or it heals as a flat mass
• Light through water reads as soft diagonal bands, and it only works above about 20 cm
• White ink used for foam and scale shine yellows and sinks, so ask for bare skin where you want the brightest points
• Teal and turquoise drift towards grey green faster than most colours, which is worth knowing before you commit a whole tail to them

Placement, and how each version ages

A mermaid is a long curved figure, so she sits naturally on the outer thigh, the outer upper arm, the calf and down the ribs. The curve of the tail should follow the curve of the limb instead of cutting across it, and that is something an artist decides on your body with a marker. Across the back a large piece has the room for water and light.

At twenty years the traditional version wins, every time. Heavy black outline, saturated flat colour, no fine detail to lose. A realism mermaid looks its best on the day it is finished and softens steadily after that, and most people who get one book a touch up at six to ten years to bring the contrast in the water back.