Black and grey flash design of a skeletal mermaid holding a skull and a flower, with dotwork sunburst rays and stippled waves inside an oval frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal mermaid with skull and sunburst

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A skeletal mermaid with long wavy hair and a flower in it holds a skull in one hand and a flower in the other. She stands among stylised waves, with a radiating sunburst behind her inside an oval border. The work is rendered in black ink with fine hatching, stippling and dense dotwork shading across the rays, waves and scaled tail.

Dotwork Mermaid Skeleton Skull Flower Sunburst Wave Sea Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last train to Saltcombe was cancelled at six, so you sit on platform two with your collar turned up and watch the tide climb the sea wall below the station. Nobody else is waiting. The departure board flickers between Delayed and a grey blank, and the only steady sound is the water, which keeps a time of its own.

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Then a woman comes up the stairs from the shingle, her hair heavy with weed and a single pale flower caught in it. Her ribs show through a wet grey coat, and her tail drags behind her with a sound like a broom on tiles. In one hand she carries a skull the size of a plum. She lifts it to the lamp as if checking a ticket. 'Going north?' she asks. 'Everyone goes north eventually.'

She tells you the line was drowned in the great flood of 1911, that the rails still run under the bay, and that the ring of lamps on the signal gantry is the only sun she has seen since. She holds out the flower in her other hand. You know roughly what it costs to take it, and you take it anyway, because the platform is cold and the sea is loud and nobody else is coming.

When the one-fifteen finally rolls in, its doors open onto black water and a smell of salt and ticket stubs. You step aboard with the flower in your fist. Behind you, under the sleepers, a bell rings twice, and the woman on the platform is already counting the next arrivals.