Colour flash design of a dark-haired mermaid with a green scaled tail seated on a pink and orange shell, holding a pearl necklace among rising bubbles and two yellow fish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid on a shell with bubbles

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A vintage-style illustration of a dark-haired mermaid with a teal scaled tail, seated on an open pink and orange clam shell. She holds a strand of pearls, has a red hibiscus in her hair, and is surrounded by floating bubbles and two yellow and orange tropical fish. The bold outlines, smooth colour fills and white highlights are set against a plain white background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two tropical fish came first, nosing the lobster pots on Gulls Reach slipway as if they had paid for a ticket. Mrs Abernethy saw them from the chip shop window and dropped the vinegar. By the time the tide turned, half the village was crowding the sea wall to see what had followed them in.

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The mermaid sat on a clam shell the size of a fishing cart, pink at the lip and deepening to orange where the hinge bent. She combed her black hair with one hand and lifted a string of pearls to the light with the other. Bubbles drifted off her like froth from a bad pint, and nobody could say where they went when they popped. Old Tom Vickery swore they popped inside his head.

She wanted a necklace back, she said, and would not say who had taken it. The harbourmaster offered a bag of crab claws. The vicar offered a prayer. Eventually my nan, who had never once in forty years been stumped by a stranger, walked down the slipway in her wellies and asked the mermaid what the pearls were worth to her.

The mermaid laughed, a sound like a spoon rattling in a tin, and dropped the strand into Nan's palm. Every pearl was warm. Nan wore them to her anniversary dinners, and to her funeral in a plain black dress, and each time she fastened the clasp she said the same thing: the sea keeps accounts, love, and it always pays its debts in something you can hold.

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