A Tale of Two Mermaids

Some time in 2022 my sister sent me photos from a work trip. One of them was a picture of a stone inlay featuring a lovely and markedly Sapphic [1] mermaid. The tiles themselves can be found just outside Lisbon, in Belem, part of a monument to the early explorers — across the street from the grave of Vasco de Gama. She is part of the Rosa dos Ventos, a large scale compass rose inlaid in the entire plaza. Now, maybe I’m projecting a little on the man hating, but I immediately fell in love with her whole attitude and abandoned the two “last” (ha!) tattoos [2] I was planning in order to get Muriel and her buff AF arms and her general disdain inked on me post-haste.

Muriel, in stone form. Muriel does not want to hear about your day, your crypto, your workout, your fave band, or anything but the soft gurgle of your watery demise.

Style-wise, she was something of a departure for me. I’ve always gone for color in my ink, because duh, colors are pretty. Not my first portrait of a fictional and generally uninterested lady; my second tattoo and first large-scale piece was an illustration of Deirdre of the Sorrows from a book I got for my first Christmas. Nor was it the first ink I’d gotten for the person I wanted to become rather than the person I was. I needed a little more Muriel in my attitude, her minimalist face still somehow saying “Try me, I dare you.”

But I have never been a mermaid kind of girl. Blue green hair, sure, but the popular depictions of mermaids are entirely too femme for me to feel kinship. Imagine aspiring to do nothing but bask on rocks, brushing your hair and making men desire you. Not my scene at all. (I will cop to a soft spot for all things iridescent and glitter covered, though. So sparkle, much color.)

I treat tattoos kind of like Polaroids, a snapshot frozen in time of what matters enough to me at that point in my life to have it gently licked onto my body by kittens. 16 year old me was a Celtic witch with crescent moons and Ogham. Four oak leaves, drawn by my dad, to represent my family when I moved out and started my own, then 4 footprints for myself, the kids, and the Nice Boy. A pride flag, tattooed after the list of people from town who had voted against gay marriage was leaked. And a power fist on top of it when the backlash against Pride started to ramp up in 2016 and I felt the need to punch people with queerness. (If only.) I don’t regret any of them because I don’t regret who I was when I got them, they all got me here one way or another.

A few months ago, I was browsing in an antique store when I suddenly found myself face to face with Muriel’s fatter, sassier, chain smoking older sister, Stormee [3].

I couldn’t find this for the longest time because I remembered her as being one of Steve Dallas’s dates, but lo, I was mistaken.

Stormee is not full of confidence and disdain. Stormee is absolutely, 100%, over it — all of it — but not in an empowering, taking-her-power-back way. No, her face says “Goddamn it, I’ve been luring sailors to their doom for 10 hours and the tips aren’t shit today. I’m gonna take my tail off and have a smoke while you cash me out. And tell Johnny he shorted me $20 from last week, the cheap sonofabitch.” Stormee is tired of men precisely because she can’t quit them, even when they are a parade of disappointments.

The artists at the tattoo studio thought it looked more like our heroine is riding a smallish whale, perhaps? but I prefer my interpretation, that she took her tail off to sit and have a smoke on a nearby rock due to how Over It All she is. Also, not really sure why she also has wings? The tiles were originally designed to insulate the wall behind a coal stove, clearly hand painted, with no artist attribution.

Muriel drinks kale smoothies and listens to the Indigo Girls and wears hiking boots. Stormee drinks 7&7s and has an entire pole routine to disco classics and wears stiletto boots that zip over her knee. They both have at least one good friend who does drag. And they both think Ariel was out of her mind.

I had not entirely intended to mimic the placement and aesthetic of the paired swallows, fave of Suicide Girls and rockabilly babes everywhere [honestly, I was more a Joy of Spex gal, but I have to hand it to SG’s marketing of their aesthetic] but the two of them together actually look like a riff on that traditional tattoo. Or the shoulder angel and devil, not that I’m sure who is who in that scenario.

Perhaps they’re aspirational in the sense that every day, I look forward more and more to the day that I can just wander off into the wild and become a swamp witch, all murky green and dangerous to unwary mortals, or a sea hag in a lonely cave by the sea cursing sailors who ruin my vibe or coaxing lovers to walk off cliffs in the fog. I used to call it my goat-herding index, “it” being the loudness of the urge to abandon society and live on a remote mountaintop with goats, coming down to the village for supplies twice a year and frightening local children. But who wants to live on top of a mountain anyway, all cold and dry? The sea offers equally beautiful vistas, and every mood a woman could ever want, and my lungs like it much better, thank you very much.

go in the wet, says my brain.

[1] Tell me Muriel didn’t start for her college rugby team.

[2] I go back and forth on where/if to get the NC tattoo from Bitch Planet, but I’m leaning towards the inside of one wrist, and filled with tacky pink and green leopard print, and I need Tank Girl flipping the world off on my free thigh even though if push came to shove I’m more of a Jet.

[3] I am extremely disappointed that none of my friends got the reference, even though I read it in a Bloom County collection when I was in junior high and am the only person I know who used that as a way to remember how to spell “appalled.”