Painted flash design of a skeletal mermaid with sugar skull face paint, holding a hand mirror, with teal scale flowers on a pink background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull mermaid with mirror

Colour · Flash

A coloured illustration of a mermaid with a skeletal torso and a sugar skull face, holding a small ornate hand mirror and a tall flower-shaped object. The linework is bold and outlined in black, with the ribcage and bones picked out in cream. The tail is filled with teal and green flowers edged in red and orange, set against a flat pink background with long dark blue hair.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond froze on the second Sunday of January, hard enough that Dad walked out to break the ice for the ewes and came back quiet. By the time I reached the reeds with the bucket, there was a woman sitting on the far bank with frost along her tail. Her face was painted white and black, with green-lidded eyes and a red mouth, and she was combing her long blue hair with the hand that wasn't holding a brass mirror.

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"Hold still, love," she said, though I hadn't moved. "Your collar's up on one side." I told her this was private land. She laughed, a sound like ice shifting on a trough, and tilted the mirror so its curled frame caught the low sun. "Your gran's, that frame. She left it in the dairy when she went under." I didn't know my gran had ever been near water. The woman said the pond had been waiting since the Hollis boy drowned in the summer of '47, and it was tired of waiting.

I should have run. Instead I held out the bucket, and she took the handle with fingers like cold candles and poured the water back in one drop at a time. Each drop froze into a flower on the ice. The flowers on her tail opened and went red at their edges, and she slid off the bank without a splash.

The mirror was left on the gatepost. When I picked it up, it showed the field and the grey barn and nothing else, not even me, only the pink of the sunset held in the glass like a coin she meant to come back for.

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