Colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a dark-haired girl with a mermaid tail, a banner reading I'M NOT PERKY, and a dark creature with a small pink figure below.

Gothic girl mermaid banner on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A pale-skinned girl with long black braids and heavy dark eyes is shown with a mermaid-style scaled tail that curls around the lower part of the design. A ribbon banner above her carries the words I'M NOT PERKY, and a small dagger-like shape sits at the top. Bold dark outlines are filled with soft greens, pinks and greys, with a dark, spiky creature at the lower left and a small pink creature at the lower right.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Head had not been lit properly since spring, and Ada Vane had decided that was the sea's fault rather than hers. She sat on the gallery rail with a bread knife across her knees, scraping limpets off the iron, while below her the tide came in grey and sulky over the rocks. The vicar's wife had called up from the path that morning to say a girl with her complexion ought to look more cheerful for the summer visitors. Ada had called back that she was not perky, she was accurate, and watched the woman walk away with her umbrella held like a crucifix.

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The thing that came up on the third night was not perky either. It had a tail the colour of wet slate, ridged and scaled, and it looped the lower rocks like a dropped rope. Its face was thin and mournful, and it held a small green bottle in one webbed hand, the cork gnawed to nothing. 'Your light is out,' it said, in the voice of a drowned bell. 'Mine has been out for forty years.' Ada had expected a song. She got a complaint.

They struck a bargain over the bottle. The mermaid wanted the beam relit so the ships would stop breaking on the reef and sending their sailors' hymns down into the cold. Ada wanted the spiky shadows that crept up the cliff at dusk to stop nosing at her door. Neither would say which of them had the worse end of the deal. She carried the paraffin up the iron stairs, and behind her the mermaid, for once, said nothing at all.

By morning the beam swept the bay clean. On the gallery rail, where the knife had been, sat a little pink crab no bigger than a thimble, waving one claw as if it had waited all night to be introduced.

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