Mermaid silhouette with swirling hair

Colour · Flash

A single-colour purple silhouette of a mermaid in profile, with long wavy hair that flows into curling scrolls and a small star. She holds a fish-like shape in one raised hand, and her tail sweeps down and curls into wave-like forms at the bottom. The design is solid flat fill with white negative space forming the hair strands and tail detail, on a plain white background.

Mermaid Fish Long hair Swirl Star Tail Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring were already gutted when Tamsin Rowe heard the singing under the harbour wall, and she kept her knife moving until the last fish was clean. Everyone in Porthgwidden knew the rule. You take what the tide leaves in the nets. You never take what the tide sings for.

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She went down anyway at the turn of the tide, with a lantern in one hand and her father's gaff in the other. The mermaid was snarled in the mesh his boat had dragged in from the Gull Rock, her hair so long and wet that it had knotted itself around the cord in loops and scrolls, and a small star of sea-glass had caught in the tangle like a stitch. In her raised hand she held a fish with fins as thin as lace. She did not seem frightened, only patient, the way a woman waits at a kitchen door for someone to fetch the key.

Tamsin worked the knots loose one by one with the blunt end of the gaff, and it took until the lantern guttered. When the last strand slid free, the mermaid did not thank her. She pressed the lace-finned fish into Tamsin's palm and said, in a voice like shingle turning over, that it was a debt paid, and that the sea remembers a fair hand.

At dawn the fish was a bright sliver of tin on the step, too light to be silver and too thin to eat. Tamsin pinned it to her coat for the market, and that afternoon her father's boat came back empty of herring but trailing a single long strand of hair, wet and shining, and he swore the sea had combed itself clean.