Colour tattoo of a dark-haired mermaid with closed eyes and a teal scale tail, surrounded by red fish, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with red fish on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style mermaid with closed eyes, rosy cheeks and long dark hair sits at the centre of the design, her teal tail covered in scale patterns. Red fish swim around her on both sides, drawn with bold black outlines and flat, solid fills. The tattoo is shown close up on skin against white tissue paper, with the design filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are on the platform at Gullery Halt when the last train comes in with its lamps lit and no one aboard, which is how you know the sea has been busy. The timetable board still says 22:14 in your father's chalk. Below the bench the lost property tin rattles, and you open it to find the thing nobody ever came for: a painted tin brooch of a girl with her eyes shut, her tail picked out in green enamel, a scatter of red fish behind her like sparks.

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Nobody claimed it in the spring, when the holidaymakers left their buckets and sunhats behind. You pinned it to the inside of the ticket office window so the light caught the green. Mrs Oddie from the tea stall said it was bad luck to keep an unclaimed thing on a station, and you told her the only bad luck on this line was the 6:50, which runs eleven minutes early out of spite.

Tonight the wind backs round and the tide comes right up over the crossing. You walk to the edge of the platform, where the water is licking at the yellow paint, and you do what your grandmother taught you for anything lost. You say the name of what you are missing into the dark, quietly, the way you would call a dog in. Nothing answers except the bell on the buoy, and a flicker of red moving under the surface, like a handful of coins tossed and sinking.

You go back to the office and take the brooch down from the window. You fasten it to the lapel of your coat, turn the lamp down, and leave the platform door unlocked for whoever is still out there swimming home along the line.

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