Black and grey drawing of a mermaid with long flowing hair, her scaled tail curving around to form a circular design with bubbles rising beside her.

Mermaid within a circle

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid in profile gazes upward, her long hair streaming behind her and her scaled tail looping around to form a circle. The drawing uses soft digital shading in greys, with fine scale detail and wispy, feathered edges on the hair and tail. Pale grey background and a tonal shadow inside the circle give the composition depth.

Mermaid Tail Hair Scale Bubble Circle Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond was my grandfather's last argument with the council. He dug it round, the way he said a sensible garden should be, and lined it with grey slate so the frogs could not wander off. Every March I broke the skin of ice with the back of a trowel and counted the bubbles that rose after.

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That year the bubbles came in threes, slow, as if someone underneath were breathing through a straw. Mum said it was the pump. Gran said nothing, only wound her scarf twice round her neck and went to look at the wisteria, which had come down overnight like a dropped rope.

I went out at dusk with a torch. The water was black glass, and in it, below the lily pads, something turned over. It was a long shape with scales that caught the light, curling back on itself until it made a ring the size of the pond itself. A face drifted up near the surface. It was not frightened of me. It looked at the frogspawn the way Gran looked at weather coming in over the hills, patient and already knowing how it would end.

I did not sleep. In the morning the slate rim was wet all the way round, and a single scale, grey as a fingernail, was caught on the trowel. I keep it in the tin with Grandad's seed packets. I leave the gate unlatched now, and every March I hear the bubbles, three at a time, and I do not go down to look.