Black and grey pencil-style flash drawing of a mermaid on a rock inside an oval rope frame, with a shell motif and the year 1989 at the top.

Mermaid in a rope frame with 1989

Black and grey · Flash

A seated mermaid with long flowing hair looks up and to the side, holding a shell near her chest, while a small crab sits at the lower left. She rests on a rocky outcrop inside an oval rope border decorated with shells, and a banner at the base reads Part of Your World. The shading is soft and greyscale with light rays breaking through dark water behind her.

Mermaid Shell Crab Rope frame Rock Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Three days I had been telling her the surface was overrated, and three days she had hauled herself up the same ledge to stare at the grey underside of the sky. I am a crab. I know what the sky is for, which is mostly to make gulls shout and fish nervous. But she held her shell against her chest as though it might lift off without her, and when the light came slanting down through the water in those long bent rays, she went quiet in a way I did not care for.

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The tin came in with the spring tide, rust-red and dented, with a year punched into its lid: 1989. She had never seen a number before and decided it was a door. She kept it in her shell beside the sea glass and the button with four holes, and every evening she turned it over and asked me what a year was. I told her it was a pile of the same days stacked up until somebody got bored and gave the pile a name. She said that sounded lonely. I said crabs do not get lonely, we just get sideways, and she laughed so hard she sank.

On the fourth morning I went up the rock myself, which took most of an hour and one minor argument with a limpet. I sat where the rope of kelp had tangled round the stone and waited for her to notice. When she did, she swam up beside me with her hair spread out like a wrecked fishing net and asked why I looked so pleased with myself. I told her there was a boat with lamps over the next reef and a human singing in it, badly, about wanting to be where the people are. She went very still. Then she handed me the tin back, took the shell from her chest, and climbed the last of the rock without once looking down.

I stayed below with the tin, which is where crabs belong, and watched the light come through the water anyway.