Black and grey neo-traditional tattoo of a pin-up mermaid with an anchor and scaled tail across the side ribs.

Mermaid and anchor on the side ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A pin-up style mermaid sits with her hair swept up, one arm raised, and her tail curling down the side of the ribs, with an anchor behind her. The linework is bold and the shading is soft and smooth, with fine scale detail on the tail and wave-like lines across its fin. The tattoo is in black and grey only, and a faint outline of a flower is visible toward the lower left of the frame.

Neo-trad Traditional Ribs Mermaid Anchor Pin-up Tail Scale Wave Hair Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Edmund kept the bell on the island priory of Saint Aidan's Rock, and when the tide went out he walked the causeway to fetch bread from the mainland. One winter the sea took the boat's anchor from the mooring stone, and the abbot said it must be got back before the spring storms, or the brothers would have no way to reach the boats that brought salt and oil.

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Edmund went down at low water with a rope and a lamp. Under the weed he found the anchor wedged in the rock, and beside it a woman sitting on the stone with her tail curled round the iron like a cat round a post. Her hair was piled high and pinned with shells, and one arm was lifted as though to wave at the priory windows. She did not look afraid. She looked at him the way the sisters across the bay looked at a man who had knocked on the wrong door.

"That anchor is mine now," she said. "Your boat dragged it across my garden, and I have grown fond of it."

Edmund said the abbey had need of it. She laughed, and the sound went up the cliff. She would give it back, she said, on one condition: the priory bell must be rung at dusk for every sailor lost off the island, and not only on feast days. He agreed before he had thought about it, as men do with the sea.

The anchor came up that spring on the flood, and the bell has rung at dusk ever since. Sometimes, the old fishermen say, a pale arm can be seen lifted from the water beyond the causeway, as if returning a greeting.