Painted neo-traditional mermaid design with long flowing black hair, red accents and a scaled tail curling around bubbles, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Mermaid design with flowing black hair

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A painted mermaid with closed eyes, red lips and red coral-like ornaments in her wind-swept black hair, shown with her scaled tail curling into a large loop. The linework is soft and painterly, with grey and black washes, white highlights in the hair and tail, and small bubbles floating around the figure. Red accents appear in the bodice, the tail scales and the hair ornaments, against a pale paper background.

Neo-trad Mermaid Hair Tail Scale Bubble Coral Flower Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Saltmarket for three days, and the fishmongers had stopped pretending it was weather. I sold dried kelp and bottled tides from a trestle under the Gallows Arch, and every evening I counted my coins twice because the damp made the copper go green. The woman who came to my stall that Thursday wore no coat. Her hair hung black and heavy down to the cobbles, and tiny red coral sprigs were caught in it, as if she had walked up out of the harbour and forgotten to shake the sea loose.

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She wanted a comb. Not for her hair, she said, but for the tide, which kept tangling itself round the pier posts and dragging the boats sideways. I told her I had one carved from a whale's rib, and it would cost her a year of her own sleep. She laughed, a bright clean sound that cut through the rain, and paid me in a single pearl the size of a sparrow's egg. I have never found a bank that would take it, and I have never tried to sell it.

The tide came in that night without its tangles. The boats rode straight and the gulls stopped screaming. Before dawn I walked down to the water and saw a long loop of silver-grey tail turning slowly beneath the harbour lights, and a wash of red that I thought at first was blood. Then it was gone, and bubbles rose where it had been, drifting up through the rain like loose pearls, and I understood I had been paid in full.