Black and grey fine line mermaid tattoo with flowing hair, bubbles and skulls in her tail, on the outer thigh.

Mermaid with skulls on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A mermaid with long, flowing hair rises among bubbles and wisps of water, with her tail curling down the leg. Skulls are worked into the folds of the tail, and the scales are built from fine linework with areas of dotwork shading. The tattoo is in black ink and greys, and the design fills the length of the thigh against a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Dotwork Thigh Mermaid Skull Bubble Hair Tail Scale Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on the lower drain has gone the colour of dishwater, and you are kneeling on the bank with a crowbar when the sluice gate groans and something pale rolls up against the grating. It is a skull, small and clean, a lamb's or a sheep's, you tell yourself, and then a second one knocks against the first like a pair of teeth. Your father always said the drain was only ever a drain. He said it the winter the Pryce boy went under the ice, and he said it again over the kettle, not looking at you.

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You work the grating loose anyway. Under it the water is black and still, and in the stillness a shape turns slowly, long hair fanned out like weed, bubbles lifting from somewhere below and breaking against the ice with tiny clicks. She does not look at you. Her tail is folded over itself the way a wet coat hangs over a chair, and the folds are full of skulls, dozens of them, nested into the scales like eggs in straw. Some are smooth. Some still have their teeth.

You should go and fetch your father. Instead you reach in. The water is warmer than the air by a mile, and she lifts one hand, slowly, and presses a skull into your palm. It weighs almost nothing. Someone has scratched a date on its brow, and beneath it a small drawn tide mark. She is asking you to keep it, or to carry it up to the farm and bury it somewhere dry. You cannot tell which.

By dusk the hard frost has come down over the fields and the drain is a plate of white. You sit at the kitchen table with the skull wrapped in a tea towel beside the bread knife. Your father reads the paper and does not ask what is in the towel. Out past the window, under the ice, something knocks twice, patient as a neighbour, and you lift your cup and pretend you have not heard.