Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mermaid curled inside an open sardine tin, with bold outlines and stippled shading, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid in a sardine tin

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid with long flowing hair sits curled up inside an open sardine tin, with her scaled tail wrapped around her body. The design uses bold black outlines and fine stippled dotwork for shading on the tail, hair and tin. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a limb with a plaid shirt visible at the right edge.

Dotwork Other Mermaid Hair Tail Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Porthallow could agree on how the mermaid came to be in Joe Penrose's tin, only that he had hauled it up from the bottom of the bay in his net on a Tuesday and had not opened it until the Friday, because his mother said a thing that closed its own mouth ought to be left closed. When at last he prised the lid back with the old key, the smell was of brine and nothing worse, and inside, folded up tight as a clenched hand, sat a woman no longer than his forearm.

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She had hair the colour of wet rope and she would not look at him. He set the tin on the windowsill of the net loft and went down to the quay to sell the pilchards, and when he came back she had shifted her tail a little, so the scales caught the lamp. He told nobody. He began leaving the tin open with a saucer of seawater beside it, and each morning the saucer was lower and the tin sat a little nearer the window, and nearer the sea.

On the last night of the herring season the wind came round to the west and the bay went silver under a half moon. Joe carried the tin down the slipway, past the chapel and the drying racks, and set it on the wet stone where the tide was turning. The mermaid unfolded herself slowly, the way a sardine lays flat once it has been cooked, and looked back once at the lighthouse. Then she slid over the lip of the tin and was gone under the black water without a ripple.

Joe kept the tin. It hangs now on a nail above the stove, empty and polished, and when the boats come in late his wife says it is the only thing in the house that never asks for its supper.