Traditional colour tattoo of a skeleton mermaid with flowers in her hair, her scaled tail wrapped around a red anchor, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton mermaid and anchor on a leg

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A skeletal mermaid with long flowing hair decorated with flowers sits atop a red anchor, her green and pink scaled tail curling around the shank. Bold black outlines define the bones, scales and anchor, with blue bubbles rising around the figure. The vivid colour fills the design against a dark background on a limb.

Traditional Other Mermaid Skeleton Anchor Flower Bubble Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At half past five the tide had turned against the Ellen Maud, and Tamsin Greaves stood on the wet concrete of Harrow Quay with a clipboard gone soft at the corners. The skipper, Ivo Dacre, had declared two crates of mackerel, a coil of rope and nothing else, which was exactly what men said when they had something to hide.

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She climbed down the ladder herself. The hold smelled of diesel and brine. Beneath a tarpaulin sat a brass-cornered sea chest, and on its lid someone had painted a red anchor with a woman coiled round its shank. The woman had no flesh left on her, only a crown of faded marigolds and a tail the colour of a kingfisher's back, scales picked out in pink. Ivo watched Tamsin not look at it.

"My wife's," he said. "Her father made it. She's in the ground up at Carrick, so there's nothing to declare."

"Nothing to declare," Tamsin agreed, and lifted the lid anyway, because the rules were the rules. Inside there was no contraband, only a bundle of letters tied with tarred twine and a single envelope addressed in faded ink to the Harbourmaster, to be opened at slack water. She stood on the quay at slack water with the envelope in her hand and read it aloud to the gulls: a list of boats lost, names of men who had not come home, and at the bottom, in a looser hand, a request that someone keep the light on for the girl who sang under the breakwater.

She stamped the form Nothing to Declare and signed her initials beside the stamp. When she looked back down into the hold, a thin line of bubbles was rising from the seam of the chest, one after another, silver in the lamplight, and neither of them said a word about it.