Black ink drawing of a mermaid skeleton with long flowing hair, swimming beside two fish skeletons, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal mermaid with fish skeletons

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a skeletal mermaid with a skull and long, flowing hair that curls across the left side, reaching towards a fish skeleton at upper right. Two further fish skeletons appear, one at the top and one at the bottom right, with detailed ribs, spines and tails. The work is rendered in black ink with fine linework, hatching and stippled shading on a plain white background, and the composition is arranged in a loose diagonal flow.

Mermaid Skeleton Skull Fish Hair Bone Underwater

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cod came in on Tuesday with its jaw still open, and Marjorie Quayle decided it would not be bagged for the bins. She carried it through the articulation room in both hands, past the shelves of labelled gulls and the long drawer of sharks, and set it down beside the mermaid. Nobody at the Hull museum could say who had made her. A trawlerman's widow from Grimsby had sent her up in a biscuit tin wrapped in a feed sack, with a note that read only: keep her out of the sun.

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Marjorie worked through the night with fine brass wire and a magnifier on a strap. The mermaid's spine had come loose at the hips, and her ribs had shifted with the damp, so that her hair seemed to drift behind her in a current that did not exist in that room. Marjorie wired each vertebra back in order, counting under her breath, and every so often the radiator ticked and the whole skeleton seemed to lean an inch towards the second fish, the one with its mouth wide and its gills picked clean.

At four she found that the cod's ribs fitted exactly between the mermaid's fingers, as if they had been meant to hold it all along. She sorted the small bones by size and lined them up on the top shelf, then hummed the tune a fishmonger's wife had once sang on the dock for sixpence a time.

By dawn the biscuit tin lay empty on the windowsill. The cod, the mermaid and the great fish with the spiked tail were all facing the same way, out past the glass towards the Humber, where the tide was turning. Marjorie turned off the lamp and did not correct them.