Black and grey pin-up mermaid with curled hair riding a black seahorse, shown as a tattoo design on a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pin-up mermaid riding a seahorse

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pin-up style mermaid with curled hair, red lips and a pearl necklace sits astride a large black seahorse. The mermaid is rendered in white and light grey with smooth shading and dark outlines, while the seahorse has a bold black body with grey edging and a spiralled tail. A small bubble floats to the right against a plain black background, with the figures arranged as a single centred design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie Vance had been paid in pearls for eleven summers at Prospect Pier, and she counted every one against the rent. The Sea Wonders booth stood between the candyfloss and the penny arcade, its tank lit blue, and the manager, a man called Dinsdale who wore a Panama in all weathers, kept the seahorse in a stone trough behind a velvet curtain. Nobody was meant to ride it. Nobody was meant to ask why it was so black, or why its eye followed the ticket box.

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The night the fog rolled in off the Wash, Dinsdale locked up and went to the Anchor. Marjorie unwound the pearls from her neck, looped them twice around the seahorse's crest and said, "Go on then, you old fool, take me somewhere with a view." The creature had been waiting, she realised, for someone to ask properly. Its fins rippled like wet silk, it lifted her clear of the trough, and the water ran off her silver tail as if she had been cut from a film reel.

They went out past the pier lights, past the lifeboat house, past the buoy that groaned like a lonely cow. The seahorse curled its spiral tail around each piling it passed, showing off. Behind them the fairground sank into the murk until only a string of bulbs was left, and Marjorie laughed so hard that a bubble slipped from her lips and drifted up towards the moon.

At dawn Dinsdale found the booth empty except for a single pearl on the velvet and a note pinned under the tank in red lipstick: Gone to see the world. Don't wait up. The takings sat on the counter, every penny of them. He never did find the rest of the necklace, but he keeps that one pearl in his waistcoat, and on still nights he swears he can hear a bell ringing somewhere beyond the breakwater.

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