Shaded colour mermaid tattoo with purple and teal scales and an orange starfish, placed across a person's upper back.

Mermaid with starfish on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid sits on a dark rock with her head turned away, holding a pearl in one hand while her long hair flows around her. Her tail has purple and teal scales, and the rock and fins are rendered in soft grey shading with brown tones. An orange starfish with a pink centre sits beside the tail, giving the composition a bright focal accent against the grey.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In Harrowby Cove the fishermen's wives kept a jar of salt on every windowsill, and nobody asked why. The mermaid who lived off the breakwater had come up the year the old lighthouse keeper died. Each evening she sat on the flat black rock below the chapel, combing her hair with her fingers and turning her face from the town. Mrs Ellery's boy, Tom, swore she sang in no language he knew.

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Her pearl had come from the bell of the Lady Ada, lost in a squall in 1931. Every man in the village had a theory about what it was worth, and none of them had the nerve to ask her for it. Tom asked. He went down at low water with a biscuit tin of cockles, set them on the rock, and waited until the tide was nearly over his boots before she looked at him.

"You want the pearl," she said. "Everyone wants something from the sea." Tom said he wanted nothing, only to know why the starfish clinging to the rock had turned as orange as a lamp when every other one that morning had been grey. She laughed, a sound like gravel in a bucket, and told him the starfish were the drowned men's children, sent up to keep watch. Then she opened her hand and let him see that the pearl was pale pink at its heart, and that it was not hers to keep.

He walked home with nothing but salt on his cuffs. The next spring the starfish was still at the edge of the tideline, and the mermaid still sat with her back to the town. Mrs Ellery put a fresh jar of salt on the sill and did not ask him what he had seen.

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