Neo-traditional style tattoo flash design of a dark-haired mermaid wearing an octopus headpiece, with a Black Pearl banner and a red background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with octopus and Black Pearl banner

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A pin-up style mermaid with dark red and black hair, a small octopus perched on her head and a jewelled earring. She holds a ribbon banner reading BLACK PEARL across the composition, with a pink and red scaled tail curling below and a fan-like fin behind her. Bold dark outlines, smooth colour fills and glossy highlights sit over a red background with pale bubble shapes.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the Marigold put in at Gibraltar on the Tuesday and I have been counting the days since, so forgive the ink blots. You will laugh at me, but the bosun swears the thing we pulled up in the trawl last week was a black pearl the size of a plum, and the octopus that came with it had the cheek to sit on the rim of the bucket like a magistrate. I threw it back, of course. Mr Pryce wanted it for the Admiralty, but I told him the sea has its own courts.

Keep reading

The woman who lives under the reef off Cape Trafalgar sent a boy in a rowing skiff to the quay with a message scratched on a slate. It said only: Bring back what you took, or bring back the one who took it. I have no idea who she is, and the harbourmaster looked at me as if I had been drinking, which I had not, not before noon. Still, I went out to the reef at dawn with the bucket, and she was there with her red hair spread over the water like weed and a little purple octopus riding her crown, bright as a jewel.

She did not ask for the pearl. She asked whether I still had the ribbon from the bosun's cap, the blue one you tied on me the day I shipped out. I did, God help me, it is in my breast pocket now. She tied it round her wrist, the way you once tied it round mine, and sank without a word, and when I looked down the bubbles were rising in pale rings all around the boat.

I am home in a fortnight. Put the kettle on. I shall tell you the rest by the fire, and you may decide for yourself whether a sailor is allowed to keep a pearl he never found.

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