Line drawing of two skeletal mermaids with mint green hair and pink shells on a black background, with mirrored lettering reading dead and sea.

Skeleton mermaids with mint hair

Mixed · Flash

Two skeletal mermaids face opposite directions, each with a fishtail and mint green hair, with small pink shells at the chest. The bones are drawn in clean white linework with simple shading, set against a black background with a light speckled texture. The mirrored lettering reading dead and sea sits in the upper left and lower right corners, balancing the composition diagonally.

Skeleton Mermaid Shell Sea Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maro, the ship you sailed on is not the ship I saw come back into the harbour at Ostia, and the men on the quay would not say why. Three of them carried a grey sail rolled like a body and did not look at me. So I am writing this on the back of the wax tablet you left in my box, which is the only clean surface I have.

Keep reading

You asked me to carve the pair of mermaids for your bench, the ones with fish tails and the green hair the Alexandrian dyers sell. I cut them in ox bone, as you wanted, and I cut the letters the wrong way round, DEAD above and SEA below, so that they would read true when pressed into wax. Father taught me that trick. Each figure faces apart from the other, one towards the land and one towards the open water, because you said a pair should never be looking at the same thing.

Yesterday the tide brought a board up under the mole with a name half scratched off. Tucked in a crack of it was a small pink shell, rubbed nearly white, and I knew it belonged to the second mermaid, the one I had not yet finished. I have kept her in the water jar on my sill. She is facing the door.

Come home, or send word. If you cannot send word, I will know from the tide.