Colour tattoo of a mermaid with flowing multicoloured hair holding a pink flower, with a script quote beneath, on a person's side ribs.

Mermaid with wild flower quote on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A mermaid lies on her front with her long tail curling to the left and her hair streaming behind her, reaching toward a small pink flower. A line of script beneath her reads "Do you suppose she's a wild flower?" The linework is clean and the tail and hair use soft grey, teal, pink and blue shading against a pale skin tone, with the background showing a tattoo studio interior.

Ribs Mermaid Tail Hair Flower Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin Roskilly had been sent up the cliff path with a basket of pilchards for her aunt, and found the mermaid instead, lying on the flat rock below the chapel with her tail laid out behind her like a wet rope left to dry. She was not reaching for the sea. She was reaching for a thrift flower growing from a crack in the stone, pink as a cut lip, and her hair ran out over the rock in grey and teal and a colour Tamsin had no name for.

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"You'll catch your death," Tamsin said. The mermaid did not look up. Her fingers stopped a finger's width short of the bloom. Tamsin's aunt had told her that the sea-folk never pick anything that grows on land, because a thing picked is a thing claimed, and they gave up claiming long ago. Tamsin set the basket down, sat on the warm slate, and asked the question her aunt would have scolded her for: did the mermaid suppose she was a wild flower herself, rooted somewhere she could not leave?

The mermaid turned then, slowly, and her eyes were the colour of the harbour at dusk. She said nothing. She only lowered her hand to the rock, left the flower where it stood, and let the tide come up round her tail. Tamsin waited until the water reached the basket's handle before she understood that the answer was no, or perhaps that the question was the wrong shape.

Her aunt asked her that evening why the pilchards were still in the basket. Tamsin said she had been keeping them for someone who had not come for them. Up on the cliff the flower kept its place, and nobody picked it.