Neo-traditional flash design of a red-haired mermaid in a grey shell top, with a green scaled tail, wave pattern, stars and a red flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with waves and red flower in ornate frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A full-colour drawing of a red-haired mermaid with her arms raised behind her head, wearing a grey shell-style top. Her green scaled tail sinks into layered blue and green waves, with black linework and small tattoo-style motifs on the tail, and the scene is framed by a scrolled cartouche with gold edging, two star shapes and a red flower. The bold outlines, shading and saturated palette suit a bold traditional-style sheet.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are nine the winter the pumps stop, and your father comes up the lane at noon with his lamp still lit. The men say the water has found the old workings under Hollin seam and will not be told to leave. Nobody in the terraces talks about anything else for a week.

Keep reading

Your gran keeps a biscuit tin on the mantel with a painted lady on its lid, red hair spilling over green waves, arms folded behind her head as if the sea bores her. She says the lady came up the shaft in 1911 and made the men laugh so they forgot the cold. You do not believe her. You take the tin down anyway and prise the lid off with a butter knife.

Inside is a folded map of the galleries, pencilled with tiny fish where the roads drown, and a note in her looping hand: go down where the water sings, not where it lies still. On the Saturday you walk up Hollin Bank with the tin buttoned under your coat. The shaft is a black mirror with a rust-red flower of spoil drifting on it, and the wind carries a sound like a far-off choir.

You kneel on the cold brick and tip the tin. The map slides out, turns once on the surface, and sinks the way everything here sinks, without fuss. Somewhere under the heap a bell rings a single time, and you find you are not frightened any more, only listening.

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