Neo-traditional flash design of a red-haired mermaid with a teal tail, two fish and a SIREN banner, in an oval frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with fish in an oval frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A coloured illustration of a red-haired mermaid with green eyes and a teal scaled tail, shown above a pale ribbon banner reading SIREN. Two small fish swim beside her, and a shell and seaweed sit among the lower details. Bold dark outlines, soft shading and a muted blue-grey oval background frame the figure.

Neo-trad Mermaid Fish Banner Shell Seaweed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove, you lot, and don't let the kettle hear you laughing. Scarrow Haven had a siren once, and she was no bonny thing sitting on a rock with a comb. She was a clerk's daughter from Tallow Row with hair the colour of rust-fire, and she swam out past the breakwater every evening because her father had said girls didn't go past the buoy.

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Her two companions were the Pilcher brothers, though everyone called them the fish. Little yellow things with more opinions than the harbourmaster. They squabbled over the tides and kept count of the boats. When the fog came in thick off the Skerry, it was the fish who swam ahead to the channel and doubled back, flicking their fins at her, telling her which way was home.

One November the Mary Ellen went out at dusk and didn't come back. The whole town stood on the slip with lanterns, and nobody had the nerve to say what everyone was thinking. The siren went out past the buoy anyway. She didn't sing a pretty song, mind. She sang the hymn her mother used to hum over the washing, loud and flat, the way you'd shout at a man who'd lost his way. And out of the murk came the Mary Ellen, steered by a voice nobody on board had ever heard before.

Next morning someone painted SIREN on a strip of ribbon across the bow, and the fish still swim the length of it, squabbling over who gets the credit. So if you ever hear a loud, flat hymn coming across the water on a foggy night, don't go back to bed. Row towards it.