Purple line drawing of a mermaid in a pirate hat holding a pipe beside a treasure chest, skulls and a shipwreck, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid pirate with treasure chest and skulls

Colour · Flash

A purple line drawing of a mermaid wearing a feathered tricorn hat and smoking a pipe, seated beside an open treasure chest, scattered coins and two human skulls. A wrecked ship and a crab sit in the background and foreground on a sandy shore beneath a cloudy sky. The work uses fine hatching and cross-hatching for shading on a cream background, with a single ink colour throughout.

Mermaid Pirate Hat Skull Ship Coin Crab Pipe Sea Sand Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chest had been sitting on the Hollow Stones since the tide turned, and Mags Tregear swore on her late husband's boots it had not been there at dawn. She came down the shingle with a sack over one shoulder and a gaff in her fist, expecting gulls and bad luck, and found instead a mermaid in a salt-stiff tricorn, a gull's feather bent over the brim, sitting on the broken prow of the Persephone as if she owned the bay. Pipe smoke curled from her teeth in thin grey threads.

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"That's not yours to take, Margaret," the mermaid said, without looking round. Her voice had the grind of a rope under strain. "Nor mine to give. Nobody's, now. Sit if you like. The skulls don't bite."

Mags sat on an upturned oar. Two skulls lay in the sand by the wreck, one with its jaw hanging open as though mid-sentence, the other grinning up at the sky from the crab's favourite corner. "Whose were they?" she asked, because that was what you asked.

"Captain Hobb's, and his first mate's. Hobb cheated me out of a silver comb in eighteen-forty and tried to drown me for the lack of it. I let the mate do the drowning. He kept his promise to himself." She tapped ash into the sand. "The chest is for whoever sits here next. I've never once got the lid open myself. Funny thing, that."

Mags stood, walked to the chest, and lifted the iron latch. Inside lay only a scatter of coins, dull and green, and a folded note in a hand she half recognised from the harbour ledger. She unfolded it. It read: *Take one. Leave the rest for the crab.* When she looked up, the mermaid had gone, and a small crab was already backing out from under the lid with a coin balanced on its shell, very pleased with itself.