Black and teal mermaid silhouette tattoo with swirling teal and black vines on pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid silhouette with teal tail and vines

Mixed · Photo

A dark grey silhouette of a mermaid with one arm raised and long flowing hair sits at the centre of the design. Her tail is filled with teal shading that fades across it, and the outlines are solid black. Teal and black swirling vines and wave shapes curl around the figure, with small droplet shapes at the top and sides, on a pale, softly lit background.

Mermaid Silhouette Vine Wave Swirl Hair Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide came in over the Hebble flats the night Mags Tulliver came home for her thirtieth reunion, and by the time the hall lights went on at the old grammar school, the water was already lapping the bottom step of the car park. Nobody thought much of it. Nobody in Saltcoats ever thought much of the sea until it was in their kitchen.

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Her old form teacher, Mr Ainsley, had kept a box of things confiscated over the years, and at the buffet he opened it on a trestle table and started handing out the contents like prizes. A marble. A bent compass. A hairclip shaped like a comb. Then a folded square of blue paper, which he gave to Mags without reading the name written on the back. Inside, in pencil, was a drawing of a girl with her arm raised above her head, hair streaming out behind her like weed, and below her a tail that faded from ink to nothing. It was the one she had drawn at fourteen, the afternoon she was told the sea was for fishermen's wives and nobody else.

She had meant to laugh. Instead she went down the car park steps in her good shoes, and the water took her heels without any fuss, and when she turned round the hall had gone dark and small behind her. Something moved under the surface, long and patient, and a voice she half remembered said her name the way the teachers used to, all the consonants filed down.

The next morning the fishermen found a blue comb on the sand and a pencil lying beside it, and nothing else, and the school kept its reunion list for another decade out of courtesy.