Black and grey tattoo of a mermaid cradling a baby within a circular frame, with a curling fish tail, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid cradling a baby on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a mermaid with long flowing hair holding a baby close against her chest, her tail curling around them inside a circular border. Fine shading and darker outlines define the hair, feathered shapes and scaled tail, with soft grey gradients on the skin tones. The tattoo is centred on the upper back, with the person's dark hair visible at the top of the frame.

Back Mermaid Fish tail Feather Long hair Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea came up over the terrace steps again on the spring tide, past the rhubarb bed and the broken sundial, and I went down with a lantern because the gardener's boy had run home crying. I found her in the cold frame where the seed trays were kept, her tail coiled round the legs of the potting bench, a child against her breast no bigger than a loaf. The child was not crying. It had its fist wound in a strand of her hair, which was the colour of wet kelp and lay down her back like something poured.

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I should have shouted for the watch. Instead I knelt in the mud and asked her what she wanted, because my mother taught me that anything that comes up out of the water wants something, and it is only polite to ask. She didn't answer in words. She lifted the baby and turned it so I could see the pale fringe of its ear, then pressed her cheek to its head and closed her eyes. Her tail drew tight around them both, scale over scale, until the whole shape was a wreath of silver on the flagstones.

Her name, I learned later from the parish book, was Morwen Hask. She had walked out of the harbour nineteen years before with a babe in her arms, and nobody had seen her since. The gardener's boy swore the child had been left on the step by the tide. I think the sea only carried it back to the one who knew how to hold it.

In the morning the frame was dry and the seedlings were all where they should be. I planted the rhubarb again and let the bracken take the sundial. Every spring tide since, I have left the cold frame door unlatched, and I have never once found anything inside it but a shell, set down very carefully, in the shape of a ring.