Black and grey skeleton mermaid with flowers in her hair and a small red heart, with a rainbow-coloured fish tail, tattooed on the side of a torso.

Skeleton mermaid with rainbow tail on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A skeletal mermaid with a skull face, flowers in her hair and long flowing locks is shaded in black and grey, with a small red heart on her ribcage. Her fish tail extends across the skin in vivid blue, purple, green, yellow and orange, with fine scale and fin detail. The design wraps down the side of the torso, with the spine forming the tail's length.

Neo-trad Ribs Skeleton Mermaid Skull Flower Heart Spine Ribcage Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flood had crept up the lower field overnight, and Ada Penhallow waded out in her father's wellingtons to check the hurdles before the ewes woke. Ice skinned the puddles and cracked under her heels. Half sunk against the ditch wall lay something pale, its ribs showing through the silt like the frame of an upturned boat.

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It was no ewe. It had been a woman once, or someone had carved her to look like one: a skull crowned with dried thrift and a few hard blue cornflowers pressed in the autumn, long hair of old rope fibre trailing into the water. Below the ribs the spine curled away into a tail, and where the bones gave out the scales caught the low sun in blue, violet, green and gold. Ada's gran used to say the sea woman walked the cliff path every Candlemas and carried lambs out of the surf in her arms.

Ada knelt in the freezing mud and worked the frame loose. Wedged between two ribs sat a red heart no bigger than a thimble, still warm from the morning light. She thought of the lamb born dead at dawn and her father's silence over it. She set the heart on the bank, then gathered the bones into her coat, every small one, and carried them up to the barn.

By dusk the ewes were fed and the bones lay on clean straw beside the lantern. Her father came in, saw them, said nothing, and only crossed himself and left the door open. Ada waited until the wind dropped, then carried the bundle back down to the shore. She laid the bones in the tide line, heart last, and watched the first wave take the tail as though it had always been bound for the water.