Traditional style flash drawing of a dark-haired mermaid with a green scaled tail, holding a pink shell over her chest, surrounded by black stars on a parchment background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional mermaid flash with stars

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A traditional style illustration of a dark-haired mermaid with a pink shell covering her chest and a green scaled tail tipped with pink fins. Bold black outlines, flat fills and soft shading define the figure, and black five-pointed stars are scattered around her on a yellow-beige background. The composition is centred and filled, with the tail curving down the left side of the image.

Traditional Mermaid Shell Star Fish scale Tail Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Four weeks out of Valparaíso, with the Marigold Jane riding low on nitrate and nobody aboard speaking above a mutter, I went down to the lazarette for lamp oil and found a mermaid wedged between the water casks. She was no bigger than a piglet, scaled green as a bottle, with a pink shell pinned over her chest like a brooch someone had forgotten to take off. Her fins were striped pink and white, and they knocked the cask hoops in a slow, impatient rhythm.

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I should have raised the mate. Instead I sat on an upturned bucket and asked her what she wanted. She looked at me with the flat patience of a barmaid at closing time, held up one finger, then pointed at the lamp. Ship's lamps, it turned out, were the only thing she valued. Sailors had been leaving them in the water for her for generations, she said, a bargain struck by some drunk Liverpool bosun and her grandmother, and nobody had kept their side of it since the steam packets came in.

So I gave her the lamp oil, a tin of Captain Rudd's tobacco, and the brass button off my good coat. She took each one and tucked it into the shell like a pawnbroker's ticket. At dawn the sea lay flat and the stars were still out, pinned over the water like spangles on a dancer's dress, and she slipped over the side without a splash.

The mate found the lamp oil gone and blamed the cook. Nobody believed me about the mermaid, and I stopped expecting them to. Three nights later a swell rose out of nowhere, and a line of silver tails rolled alongside the hull, every one of them humming a tune I had heard as a boy in Bristol. I won't claim a tin of tobacco brought us safe into port. I only know I still keep a spare button in my pocket.