Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mermaid kissing a diver in a brass helmet, framed by a leafy vine, on the side of the ribs.

Mermaid and diver kissing on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid with scaled tail embraces a diver in a vintage brass diving helmet, with their faces meeting in a kiss. A thin leafy vine curls around the figures, and the scales and helmet are built from dense stippled dots with fine outlines. The design is shown in black and grey on a side view of the ribs, with the figures set on a tall, narrow composition.

Dotwork Traditional Ribs Mermaid Kiss Vine Leaves Fish scale Couple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody claims the things that come off the 6.14 from Skerrow Halt, so I keep a shelf for them. Umbrellas, a wooden leg once, a tin of boiled sweets nobody has opened since 1987. On a Tuesday in March the guard handed me a crate stamped DIVING EQUIPMENT, HANDLE WITH CARE, and it was wet through, though he swore it had been dry in the van.

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Inside, under a folded oilskin, sat a brass diving helmet with its front glass gone milky with salt. A card tied to the strap read, in faded ink, Deliver to the Ferryman's Widow, Platform 3. Nobody had stood on Platform 3 since they pulled up the lines in the nineties. I should have logged it and left it alone.

Instead I carried it up the stairs at closing time. The platform was empty except for a woman in a grey coat, sitting on the bench with her hands folded in her lap. Her hair smelled of kelp, and she looked at the helmet the way you look at a letter you have waited thirty years to open.

"He never came up the last time," she said. "He always said he would surface when the tide turned."

I held the helmet out to her. Through the cracked glass I saw a thread of silver bubbles rising from the brass collar, as if someone below was breathing out very slowly. She took it, pressed her mouth to the cold front, and the bubbles stopped. When the next train pulled in and I looked again, the bench was dry and the helmet was gone. Beside the timetable board there was a single green scale, right where the 6.14 is printed.