Black stencil design of a mermaid holding a trident, with a scaled tail and flowing hair, shown on a plain white background.

Mermaid with trident stencil

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid faces away from the viewer with long flowing hair, holding a trident over one shoulder and a long spear-like shaft across her body. Her tail is covered in rows of pointed scales and ends in a sweeping, fin-like fluke. The design is a solid black silhouette with white cut-out lines for hair and fin detail, shown flat on a white background.

Mermaid Trident Scale Tail Hair Spear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pell wanted the lily pond full for the August fête, and nobody had cleared the silt since his wife died, so I went down the lane with two buckets, a hose and the stencil he'd given me, a woman cut from oiled card with a trident raised over one shoulder. He'd found it in the potting shed behind the orangery, tucked inside a seed catalogue from 1931. Her hair ran down the card in long ribbons, and her tail was rows of scales, each one notched like a pear leaf.

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The hose gave out by noon, so I dug instead, down through brown muck and a century of rotted cricket balls, until my spade rang on something that was not stone. It was a trident head, green as a copper roof, its three tines bent back the way the card's had been drawn. Pell came down with his tea and stood at the edge looking at it for a long time. 'My grandmother always said the pond was a well,' he said. 'Said you never cut the lilies, or the water takes a turn.'

We lifted the trident out between us and laid it on the potting bench, beside the stencil drying on newspaper. The spear on the card lined up with the broken shaft on the bench, though neither of us had measured anything. I reckon I should have been frightened. Instead I went out to the pond edge and set the lilies back in a ring, one pot at a time, each one leaning towards the place where the trident had stood.

At the fête that Saturday Pell hung the stencil over the shed door with the trident pointing at the water. Nobody asked why the children kept trailing their fingers in the pond and coming up cold and grinning. The pond stayed full all summer, and I never did find the rest of her.