Traditional style flash drawing of a mermaid with shell top and a vintage brass diving helmet diver beside her, framed by a rope border.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid and diver under the sea

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A mermaid with long dark curls and a shell top sits beside a diver in a brass helmet and heavy suit, with bubbles and seaweed around them. The linework is bold and dark, with solid fills and simple shading on the scales and suit. The palette of yellow, ochre, olive, and coral red sits against a grey-blue background, and a rope border frames the scene.

Traditional Mermaid Shell Seaweed Bubble Rope Sun Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

He came up the ladder at the end of the pier with his brass helmet still screwed on, because his mother had always said a diver who takes his face out of the sea too soon will drown on dry land. The band inside was playing the slow one. Through the glass of the dance hall doors he could see the lamps swinging over the boards and the girls in their pale frocks turning, and he stood in the rain with seawater running out of his boots.

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Down below, the sea had kept the wreck of the Maud Ellery for thirty years, and he had been sent to bring up her bell. He found it under a bed of olive weed with a rope of old gold threaded through its mouth, and he nearly left it there. A woman sat on the bell's chain with her hair spread out like wet kelp, combing the tangles with a comb made of bone. She asked him whether the dancing above was as loud as the sea, and when he said it was louder she laughed, and a column of bubbles rose past his faceplate.

She said she would dance with him if he brought the bell up and rang it once for every turn of the floor. He agreed, because the sea never gives anything away for free, and he hauled the bell up the ladder on his back and carried it into the hall, shedding water across the lino. The fiddler stopped. The girls looked at the diver, and at the bell, and at the puddle spreading from his boots.

By the last waltz the boards were soaked through, and when the girls lifted their hems there was salt on the floor and a single brass button rolling slowly toward the door.