Neo-traditional flash design of a red-haired mermaid with teal tail, fish and a banner reading SIREN, with an anchor and wave tattoo on her arm.

Mermaid with banner reading Siren

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A cartoon-style mermaid with long red hair and turquoise eyes sits within an oval frame, with a teal scaled tail curling to the left. Two yellow and blue fish swim nearby, and a tattooed anchor, waves and a red flower decorate her arm and torso. A ribbon banner across the bottom reads SIREN, and the parchment-coloured background gives the piece a vintage feel.

Neo-trad Mermaid Fish Anchor Banner Wave Flower Lettering Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The siren came up on the tide the afternoon of the Tulloch wedding, just as the cooper's son was reaching for the ring. Everyone on the slipway heard her before they saw her. Her song went under the fiddles like a current under a rowing boat, and the old men said it was the same song that had pulled three fishermen off Skerry Point in 1887, and that nobody ever found their boots.

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Her two companions came first, a pair of striped fish no longer than a hand, bright as church glass. They circled the quay wall twice, then sat in the shallows and waited, the way dogs wait at a gate. Ina Tulloch, the bride, stood in the chapel doorway with her father's old anchor pendant on a cord and her heart going like a rope on a winch.

She did not run. She had grown up on that water and knew the rule her grandmother taught her: a siren cannot take what is sung back to her. So Ina lifted her skirts, walked down the steps to the water's edge and sang the only thing she knew well, the hymn for drowned men, but in her own voice, with the wedding words set inside it.

The siren stopped. Her tail rose green from the swell, scales catching the light like a mackerel's back. She listened for a long time. Then she took the bread Ina offered, tore it in half and gave one piece to each fish. "Sing at every wedding on this coast," Ina said, "and no one here will go into the sea for you." The siren laughed, a sound like gulls over tin, and dipped below the waves. The ring was on the cooper's son's finger before the tide turned.