Traditional style flash design of a red-haired mermaid with an anchor, two swallows, roses and a banner reading The Little Mermaid, in colour.

Mermaid, anchor and swallows flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A printed sticker of a tattoo-style design showing a red-haired mermaid in front of an anchor, with a banner reading The Little Mermaid across her body. Two swallows, a blue fish, a red crab, roses and small star accents surround the figure. Bold black outlines fill the design with red, teal and skin-toned colour on a pale peach backing.

Traditional Mermaid Anchor Swallow Banner Rose Fish Crab Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swallows came back to Gullet Quay the week the Marigold Rose went down, and old Tam Brisby said that meant someone owed the sea a body. Nell Carrick, who had mended nets since she was nine, spat over the wall and said the sea could whistle for its debts. Her brother Joss had been aboard the Marigold, and the sea had not yet sent anything back.

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On the ninth morning a red-haired woman stood knee-deep in the shallows below the slipway, weed tangled in her hair and her arms raised as if to catch the light. She did not speak. A blue-scaled fish with a fin like a feathered hat nosed at her ankles, and a red crab climbed the mooring rope with the air of a clerk sent to fetch someone. Nell waded out with her gutting knife tucked in her apron.

The woman pointed at the anchor chain, then at the sky, where the swallows had gathered in a row along the lifeboat's rigging. Nell understood a bargain when she saw one. She had nothing to give but her own hands, so she offered them, and the woman laughed, bright as a bell in fog, and took one. The crab tapped Nell's boot twice. The fish turned a slow circle and sank out of sight.

Joss walked up the quay at dusk, salt-stiff and grinning, with no memory of the sea but a long warm dark. Nell kept her right hand in her pocket for the rest of her life. Every spring the swallows came back to the wall, and every spring she counted them, and never once got past two.