Under-the-sea full sleeve tattoo

The sea off Carrow Reef was green as bottle glass that summer, and the drowned castle sat in it like a sugar cube dropped in tea. My father swore he had rowed over its towers at low tide when he was a boy, and nobody believed him, but nobody argued either. The mermaid who kept the stone sailor at the reef's edge had once come up under our boat and asked me the time, so we all knew the old stories had some bones in them.

The trouble started with the shark. Mr Pell, Dace called him, a grey brute with a mouth like a rusted gate, had trailed the Good Intent for six days, and the crew were getting jumpy. Dace wanted the harpoon primed. I went down the ladder with a bucket of pilchards and my heart going like a bilge pump, and Ysolde rose through the weed, her tail flashing copper and green. She told the shark the cargo of the sunken Hesper was his if he left our hull alone. He took the pilchards, took a gold coin she flicked at him, and swam off through the ruined arches without so much as a backward look.

Back on deck, Ma held out her palm for the coin. I gave her the pilchard-stinking thing, a dull green sixpence stamped with a ship, and she turned it over twice before tucking it in her apron. "Next time," she said, "bring back the bucket." Below us the stone sailor kept his lantern-arm raised in the murk, and I swear he looked pleased with the trade.