Black and grey ink drawing of a mermaid holding a water jug, with an anchor, stars and an AQUARIUS banner, shown as a tattoo design.

Aquarius mermaid with anchor

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with flowing hair and a scaled tail embraces a water-pouring vase, with a banner reading AQUARIUS across her tail. A coiled rope, an anchor, small stars and bubbles fill the composition around the figure. The image is finely hatched and stippled black linework on white, with no colour.

Mermaid Anchor Rope Star Bubble Scale Banner Zodiac

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The jug had been cracked since before my husband bought it off a Dutch trader, and every spring he swore he would mend it with pitch and never did. So when the storm took the Maren Lass off the Skerries and the water came up through the cottage floor, I took the jug down from the shelf and went to the shore with it, because it was the only thing in the house that seemed to know what water was for.

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The mermaid came up out of the wrack just past the tideline, her hair full of bladderwrack and tiny stars of salt. She had an anchor chain looped round one wrist, rusted to the colour of old blood, and she looked at the jug the way a fishwife looks at a bad catch. I asked her whether she had seen the Maren Lass. She said she had seen everything the sea had swallowed since the old king drowned his own fleet, and that she kept none of it, not even the names.

I told her I wanted my husband back. She laughed, and the bubbles rose from her mouth in a long chain, each one popping against the stones. Then she tipped her chin at the cracked vessel in my hands and said that the sea does not give back what it is owed, but it will pour out whatever a patient woman is willing to carry home. I understood her only when I looked down and saw water running from the crack, cold and clear, filling my boots.

I carried it up the cliff path that night, the jug spilling the whole way. By morning the cottage floor was dry and the kettle was full. My husband has never come home, but the spring by the door has never once run dry, and I have stopped wanting it to.