Black and grey traditional style flash design of a skeletal-faced mermaid seated among roses and hibiscus flowers, with bones in her hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull mermaid with roses and hibiscus

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A seated mermaid with a skull face holds a bone-like object, with bones pinned in her long wavy hair. Two large roses and several hibiscus flowers frame her, with leaves and dark shadowed foliage filling the background. The design uses bold black outlines, smooth grey shading on the scales and petals, and a light grey backdrop.

Traditional Neo-trad Mermaid Skull Rose Hibiscus Bone Hair Scale Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pumps at Hollin Bank were switched off on a Thursday, and by the Saturday the water in the sump had crept up to the lip of the shaft. My mother sent me down the back lane with a tin of milk and a jam jar of sugar, because the Foy boys swore there was a woman sitting on the winding wheel, bone pins in her hair, smoking a clay pipe and humming the chapel hymns a half-beat behind.

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She was not frightening, not at first. Her face was all bone under a skin of lamp soot, and her tail hung over the rail in long grey scales that caught the light like wet slate. The roses on the old gate had come up in February, heavy-headed and dark, and between them the hibiscus were pushing through the cinders as if the coal had never been dug out from under them. She took the milk without thanking me and poured it into the water, and the water drank.

She asked me my dad's name. I said Tommy Foy, who had gone down in the flood of '58 and never come up, and she nodded slowly, as if reading it off a ledger only she could see. 'He owes me a pipe,' she said, and held out a bony hand. The one in my coat pocket was his, the last thing they gave back, and I had carried it every day since without once lighting it. I gave it to her.

She laughed then, a dry sound like a coal shifting, and slid off the wheel. The water took her without a ripple. When I walked home the spoil heap was white with blossom from top to bottom, and in the morning the pit gates stood open, the roses gone right over the fence, and my mother said the milk tin was on the step, washed and full of rain.