Mermaid seated on a rock

Mixed · Flash

A back view of a mermaid sitting on a rock, with long dark hair streaming to the left and her arm resting on the stone. Her tail is shaded with fine scale texture in teal and deep blue, while the hair, skin and rock are rendered in soft grey smudged shading. The figure fills the centre of the frame against a pale, textured background.

Mermaid Rock Tail Scale Hair Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hettie, the tide has taken the last of the west stair, so I am writing from the chapel window, where the wind comes in sideways and keeps trying to lift the page off the sill. You will think me soft in the head, but she came again last night.

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She sits on the big grey rock below the curtain wall, the one the old lord used to call the mounting block, with her back to the castle and her face to the water. Her hair blows out to the left as though the whole sea were breathing on it, and her tail lies draped over the stone, teal going to deep blue at the fin, each scale shaded so fine you could count them by lamplight. She never turns round. I used to think she was waiting for a ship. Now I think she is only resting, the way a woman rests after carrying water a long way.

Eli wants to sell the rock. Mr Garside from Whitby has offered forty pounds for the stone to build a seawall at his new hotel, and Eli has already measured it with a length of rope. I told him the rock belongs to the castle, which is a lie, because nothing here belongs to anyone but the gulls. He laughed and said the mermaid would find another rock. He doesn't know what it cost me to climb down there the first time and leave a comb on the stone, nor how long I sat afterwards with my heart knocking.

This morning the rock was bare and wet, and on the sill of the chapel window lay one scale, teal as bottle glass, still warm when I picked it up. I have put it in the back of the psalter where you used to hide your sweets. Tell Eli nothing. Let Mr Garside come with his rope and find only stone.