Watercolour flash design of a mermaid with long black hair and red flower accents, with a grey and red scaled tail and bubbles, on a white background.

Mermaid with flowing black hair

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A stylised mermaid with closed eyes and flowing black hair, decorated with red flowers, floats among pale grey bubbles. Her scaled tail sweeps to the left in grey, pink and black, with a fin curling out to the right. The soft watercolour shading and fine pencil lines sit on a plain white background.

Neo-trad Mermaid Hair Flower Tail Scale Bubble Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring boats had been gone three days when Nell Thackray found the net snagged on the breakwater, and tangled in it, a fan of red coral no bigger than a thumbnail, still wet. Her father said it was only weed. Her mother said nothing and took the net to the loft to mend by lamplight, the way she always did when she did not want to talk.

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That night the sea came up the slipway as far as the second bollard and stopped there, flat and bright, as if listening. Nell went down in her nightdress with a jam jar. She saw the bubbles first, a dozen pale grey spheres drifting over the stones like breath on a cold window, and then the woman who rose up beside the harbour wall, her black hair spread over the water like spilt ink, her eyes closed, a scarf of red flowers pinned above one ear.

"You've got my comb," the woman said, not unkindly, and turned so that her tail caught the lamplight: grey scales edged in rose, black ones gathering at the fin, and then a long sweep of fin that curled out past the wall like a ribbon the wind had forgotten. "Your mother took a thing of mine forty years ago. It is only fair."

Nell held out the jam jar. Inside, the coral had already begun to glow faintly, like an ember that did not want to die. The woman smiled without opening her eyes, took the jar, and tipped the coral back into the sea.

In the morning the net was mended, every knot tight, and the fleet came home with the best catch in a decade. Nell's mother hung the comb-shaped gap above the loft door and never mentioned it again.