Black and grey traditional flash design of a mermaid holding a palette and brush beneath a crescent moon, with a squirrel and the banner reading She's a Rose, She's a Pearl.

Mermaid painter with squirrel and banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with pearl-strung hair and a tattooed arm holds a painter's palette and brush, seated before a crescent moon and a starry night sky. A squirrel holding a paintbrush sits at the lower left, and a curled banner across the bottom reads 'She's a Rose, She's a Pearl'. The linework is bold and clean, with solid black areas, grey shading on the figures and cloud forms, and no colour.

Traditional Mermaid Paintbrush Squirrel Crescent moon Star Cloud Banner Pearl Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the cracked tile by the urn, because you'll want your wits for this bit. Dolores kept the Marine Ballroom on the front at Scarrow, and every Saturday the band played until the sea came up the steps to listen. Her mother had been a mermaid off the rocks there before the war, so folk said, and Dolores never once denied it. She only painted the moon above the bandstand a shade brighter each year so the old fishermen could find their way home.

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The squirrel came in the autumn, a red-tailed fellow who had ridden in on a crate of herring and taken a liking to the paint pots. He sat on the rail with a brush clamped in his teeth and flicked stars out of the black ceiling until the whole hall looked like the inside of a night at sea. Nobody could say who taught him. Dolores said he'd always been there, the way a good tune is.

Then the mayor's man came with a ledger and a face like wet newspaper, and said the Corporation wanted the hall pulled down for flats. Dolores didn't argue. She took her palette down to the sand that night, dipped her brush in the tide, and painted the whole front of the building onto the water, moon and all, so that by morning every star had drifted out past the breakwater.

The mayor's man walked the front at dawn and found nothing but wet sand and a squirrel on the groyne, lettering a banner in the foam: she's a rose, she's a pearl. The words still read, even wet. Ask anyone on Scarrow pier and they'll tell you the flats never went up, and that the best dances are the ones where the floor is slick and the moon is somewhere under the water.