Ceramic travel mug printed with traditional-style flash designs of a green-tailed mermaid with a crown and red roses, with a black lid.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional flash designs on a travel mug

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A white ceramic travel mug with a black lid, printed with traditional-style flash artwork. The designs include a black-haired mermaid wearing a gold crown, red anemone-style flowers with green leaves, and a partly visible ring-shaped motif, scattered with small black stars. Bold black outlines and flat fills in red, green, yellow and gold make up the colour, set against a plain white background.

Traditional Mermaid Crown Rose Flower Star Mug

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the kettle on the van's little ring before the first trawler came round the breakwater, and she was already cross with Dennis for hanging the lifebuoy on the wrong nail again. It swung over the hatch with its faded green band and gold star, knocking against the cleat whenever the tide shifted the boards. He said it was for luck. She said it was for the gulls to nest in, and that was the only sensible thing it had ever done.

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The spyglass was the other thing that never moved. Dennis's late uncle had rolled his flash sheets around it in the galley of the Thessaly Rose, and when the boat went for scrap nobody thought to take them out. Mags found them in a biscuit tin under the bench last winter: a crowned mermaid with her hair fanned out like weed, a pair of red anemones with leaves like folded knives, every line outlined so hard you could cut your thumb on it. Someone had written NOT FOR SALE on the back in pencil, then crossed it out.

A boy in a yellow jacket came up for a tea, turned the mug in his hands as though it might tell him something, and asked whether the mermaid was a real one. Dennis, who had come up the steps behind him, looked at the tin on the counter for a long moment. Then he said the best sailors never asked that question twice.

Later, with the boats in and the wind dropped, Mags poured the last of the tea into the mug and set it on the wall beside the lifebuoy. The mermaid kept her crown tilted at the harbour, and for once the nail held.