Coloured illustration of a skeletal mermaid with a skull, flowing hair and fishbone tail, holding an open shell with a pearl, drawn as a tattoo design.

Skeletal mermaid holding a shell

Colour · Flash

A skeletal mermaid sits in profile, holding an open scallop-style shell with a pearl up near her skull. Bones are shaded in soft greys and greens with fine pencil-like linework, while the fins and tail are painted in pinks, purples and reds. The figure is centred on a plain white background, with the hair trailing out to the right and the tail curling down the right side.

Mermaid Skeleton Skull Shell Pearl Ribcage Fin Hair Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge had been stuck at Hobb's Lock since the flood, and Ada had scrubbed the galley twice by the time she found the shell. It was wedged under the coal bunker, a scallop the size of a dinner plate, rimmed with violet and rust. When she lifted it, something rolled inside with a soft knock. Nested in grey silt sat a pearl the colour of a gull's belly.

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Her father was sitting on the cabin roof with his boots off, watching the weir throw white water over the sluice. He didn't look round. "Mags Pritchard swore she saw a bones-woman combing weed out of her hair on the far bank," he said. "Tail caught on the tow ropes, so the story goes. Drowned girl, or a fishwife who got greedy with the eels. Depends who's telling it." He said the river gave back what it took, sooner or later, and never asked after the price.

Ada took the pearl to Sallow Cut that afternoon, meaning to sell it for coal and the lock fees. The pawnbroker held it to the window and whistled, then asked where it had come from. She said the bank. He told her the bank was not a place people found things like that. She walked back along the towpath with the money in her apron pocket, and the shell rattling against her hip, and she could not stop thinking about the bank at low water, where the mud had shifted and a row of small pale bones lay exposed, curled like a fishbone, with a skull that still wore a comb of weed.

She went back at dusk. The shell was easy to fit into the hollow beside the skull, where it seemed to have come from. She pressed the mud smooth over the bones with the flat of her hand. Behind her the sluice gates groaned and the water began to lift, slow and brown, until the barge came free of the bank and turned gently out into the channel, its lamp reflecting in the dark where the pearl had been.