Black and grey traditional style flash design of a tattooed mermaid holding an artist's palette, with a squirrel playing a guitar and a banner reading she's a rose, she's a pearl, set against stars

Mermaid with palette, squirrel and banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn design shows a mermaid with pinned hair and pearl jewellery, holding an artist's palette and brush, with a crescent moon behind her. A squirrel strums a guitar at the lower left, and a scroll banner across the bottom reads SHE'S A ROSE, SHE'S A PEARL. The background is a dark night sky with stars and wispy clouds. The work uses bold black outlines and heavy grey shading with no colour.

Traditional Mermaid Moon Squirrel Guitar Banner Lettering Star Cloud Pearl Rose

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train to Saltmarrow Halt leaves at twenty to twelve, and by then the platform belongs to me and the gulls. I play guitar on the bench under the clock, a battered thing with three strings that still sing if I lean into them. Nobody pays a squirrel for a tune, but the wind off the estuary pays in salt and chips, which is more than the council ever offered.

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Pearl comes up through the drain grate beside platform two most nights, shaking the sea out of her hair. She carries a palette the size of a cartwheel, its paint gone thick and glossy, and she climbs onto the waiting room shutter with a brush between her teeth. She paints the moon first, always the same silver crescent, then the stars, then the clouds that roll in from the sea like wet wool. I strum, she hums, and between the two of us the boards come alive with a sky nobody else on the coast can see.

One October, a man called Ogle arrived with a bucket of whitewash and a council letter. He stood on the ticket hall steps and glared at the painted night rising over his timetables. Pearl didn't stop. She dipped her brush, flicked three more stars across his hat, and sang the line she always sings when she's pleased with herself, the one about roses and pearls. Ogle looked up at the moon for a long while. Then he tipped his bucket into the harbour, went home, and the letter never came back.

The next morning the first train rolled in under a sky full of stars. I was still asleep on the bench with my guitar across my knees, and Pearl was already gone, back down the grate with her palette under one arm, the tide rising to meet her. The carriage doors slid open, the driver whistled, and I swear a passenger on the far side said good morning to the moon.