This work has introduced a novel image watermarking scheme leveraging a pixel pair-based shuffling (PPSh) technique for tamper detection and self-recovery. The proposed technique consists of five steps, initiating from secret bits generation, collectively known as watermark bits. Then, the next step is watermark embedding, after that, watermark extraction, tamper detection, and finally, dual self-recovery approaches have been implemented. For watermark bit generation, two prominent interpolation techniques, such as bipolar and bilinear, are applied to the cover image (CI) to obtain the compressed image. Later, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Camellia with Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) mode of operation is utilized on the compressed image to generate watermark bits. Afterwards, a PPSh-based watermark embedding strategy has been utilized to achieve the watermarked image (WI) while maintaining a standard payload capacity. Further, a variety of image processing attacks is performed on the WI to check the imperceptibility and similarity of the proposed scheme. Consequently, tamper region detection is followed by the watermark extraction procedure. Therefore, to reconstruct the tampered pixels, inpainting based dual recovery approaches are presented, named as TELEA and Naiver-Stokes (NS). The robustness and imperceptibility of the proposed scheme is measured through peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index matrix (SSIM), and mean square error (MSE). The proposed technique has achieved an average PSNR and SSIM of 54.24 dB and 0.9983, respectively. With an increment of more than 2 dB in terms of PSNR the proposed technique outperforms the existing watermarking techniques. Additionally, the proposed technique obtains a recovery increment up to 5 dB in terms of PSNR for 10 %–50 % tampering rates against the existing methods.