Traditional style tattoo of a bearded merman in a top hat and eye patch, with a blue and teal scaled tail, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bearded merman in top hat on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bearded figure in a top hat and eye patch has arms folded across a torso that becomes a fish tail. The tail is filled with teal and blue wave lines, and the figure is outlined in bold black with a red edge. The tattoo fills a tall vertical area of the lower leg against a plain pale top and a pavement background.

Traditional Calf Mermaid Top hat Beard Wave Fish tail Man

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has been out since dawn, and you are sitting on the bottom step of the slipway at Porthkell with your net needle stuck through your cardigan, when Captain Ambrose Vane rises from the green water like a cork that has forgotten it is a cork. He wears his good top hat, the one with the salt-bleached band, and the black patch over his left eye is dry, which means he has come up in a hurry.

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He folds his arms across his chest, the way he does when the harbour master is talking, and his beard lies on the water like kelp. 'They want the bay for the new cannery,' he says. 'Forty pounds for the lot, and a lamp on every hull.' You tell him your father sold his boat to the cannery in March and has not been able to look at the sea since. Ambrose says nothing. The silence is the kind a shoal makes when it has seen the net.

On Thursday the cannery men come with their lorries and their clipboards. You stand at the top of the slipway with your hands in your pockets. Below, the water is the colour of a kingfisher's back, rising in its neat ribbed lines against the stones. Ambrose is there, arms still folded, and when the first clipboard steps onto the weed he simply sinks, the hat last, bobbing once on the swell like a man tipping his hat to a widow.

By evening the tide has come right up to the wall. Your father walks down with his coat over his arm and finds the top hat turning slowly by the steps, its band still white with salt. He carries it home and sets it on the mantelpiece, where it stays, and every low tide since you have heard the buoy off the point ring twice, which is how Ambrose says he is still counting.