Coloured neo-traditional flash design of a red-haired mermaid in an oval cameo frame, with a teal tail, fish, an anchor and a banner reading SIREN.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid cameo with fish and a SIREN banner

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A red-haired mermaid with large turquoise eyes sits within an oval rope-edged cameo frame, her teal scaled tail curling to the left. Two small tropical fish swim around her head and beside her hand, with an anchor, a starfish, a seashell and a red flower added around her body. A tan banner across the base reads SIREN, and the bold outlines and saturated colours are set on a parchment-toned background.

Neo-trad Traditional Mermaid Fish Anchor Starfish Seashell Flower Banner Cameo Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove, Tom, and leave the kettle alone, it's older than your mother. You know the cottage up on the cliff past the lifeboat house? Nobody lives there now, but in my mother's day Agnes Dunmore sat in that window every evening combing her hair out over the sill like she was drying washing. The fishermen called her the siren, and they said it as a warning, because every boat that drifted past her rocks to get a better look ended up on them.

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The sea is a liar, and so are the men who sail on it. My grandfather swore he saw a tail flash in the surf below that cottage, teal as a kingfisher's back, with two little blue fish with yellow faces circling it as if they'd been paid to. Nobody believed him, but he was never the same after the night of the big storm, when the Mary Ellen went onto the Teeth and the lamp on the point went out.

Here's the thing about sirens. They don't drown you. They ask what you've lost, and then they hand it back to you under the water so you have to come down and fetch it. My grandfather said Agnes asked him for his anchor, the old brass one from his father's boat, and he gave it to her. Next morning it was lying on her doorstep, polished bright, with a starfish sitting on top of it like a paperweight.

So if you ever hear singing off the point, don't go looking. Bring a rope, and tie it to something that's still yours.