Black and grey pin-up mermaid design with pink starfish in her hair, holding a trident, with a seahorse and bubbles, on a pale teal background.

Pin-up mermaid with trident and seahorse

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A pin-up style mermaid with white curled hair in a high ponytail, decorated with a pink and black starfish, holds a trident in one hand. A seahorse, bubbles and small sparkles surround her on a pale teal background. The design uses bold black outlines, smooth shading and scaled grey tail fin details, with small pink accents on the starfish, lips and cheeks.

Neo-trad Mermaid Trident Seahorse Starfish Bubble Pin-up Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lido's manager wanted a mermaid painted on the sea wall by Whitsun, and nobody in Shelby Bay could draw one who didn't look like a bathing belle. Ruth Kettering took the job because it paid in cash and because her hand was steadier after the second gin. She climbed the scaffold with a tin of teal, a pot of pink for the lips and cheeks, and a trident borrowed from the yacht club storeroom, which she had promised to return.

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The mermaid took three weeks. Ruth gave her a high ponytail that curled at the end like a wave breaking, and pinned a pink starfish above it, then a black one for balance, because the first looked lonely. Bubbles went up the wall in white dots. In the bottom corner she put a seahorse, a dark little fellow copied from the jar in Mr Oddy's chemist window, where it had floated in spirit since 1931. Mr Oddy said it was bad luck to move it. Ruth said that was what the jar was for.

On the last Saturday before opening, the new lifeguard, a boy called Tom Varley who whistled through his teeth, found the trident leaning against the scaffold, dripping. There was no sea within two miles, and Ruth had locked the gate herself. The paint on the prongs had run, as if someone had held it under a tap and then wiped it dry on a towel.

Ruth went up the ladder with a rag and a tin of turpentine, meaning to tidy it. The grey scales were cool under her fingers. The tail had slipped a finger's width down the wall, and the seahorse was gone from its corner. When she looked over the sea wall, a small dark shape was turning slow circles in the rockpool below, waiting for her to come down and fetch the trident back.