Black and grey pencil drawing of a mermaid holding a baby on a shell, with a starry hair, pearl strands and scale detail, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid cradling a baby on a shell

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with long hair patterned with stars and a crescent moon cradles a bald infant on a large shell. Soft shading and fine hatching give the figures volume, while the shell and the tail scales are rendered in detailed pencil or ink strokes. The composition is diagonal, with a pearl strand and a scaled fin filling the lower right corner, and the drawing is in greyscale.

Mermaid Shell Pearl Star Crescent moon Hair Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the lower gallery at Hollin Pit flooded, my mother took the lamp down to the shore with a bucket of boiled rags, because the midwife was stuck on the far side of the cutting and the Hartley girl was labouring in the back kitchen with nobody but her mam for company. I went after her, though I'd been told to wait at the wall. The tide was out past the rocks, further than I had ever seen it, and there on the sand sat a shell as wide as a cart wheel, and in it a woman with her hair spread across the wet like a night sky.

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She had a child on her lap, bald as a boiled egg and very still, and she held it the way my mam held the flour sack when she didn't want it to split. Stars were pricked through her hair, and a thin moon hung in one curl as if it had snagged there. A string of pearls ran from her neck to her wrist, and a single pearl sat in the hollow of the shell where the lamp caught it. She looked up at my mother without any surprise at all, the way a woman looks at the milkman.

"The gallery took a boy in March," she said. "The sea has been keeping this one warm since. Take him to the girl in the kitchen. I'll not give the pit another." My mother didn't argue. She wrapped the child in the rags, and the mermaid slid backwards into the shallows, scales catching the light, until only her hair was left floating like weed.

The Hartley baby had come out blue and silent an hour before. My mother laid the damp, bald stranger on the girl's chest, and it drew in a breath that sounded like the tide going out over stones. When the water turned, I walked back to the shell. It was empty except for a pearl, which I still keep in my apron pocket on pit days.