I want someone to write a book where Mermaids are the women thrown off ships when the sailors got afraid because having a woman on the boat is bad luck. And as they sink to the bottom, legs tied together, they change slowly until they can breathe, until they can use their tied up legs to swim. And they drown sailors in revenge, luring them in by singing in their husky voices still stinging from the salt water they breathed.
someone please write this
“Please, don’t do this!” her voice comes out hoarse, cracked. The men leer at her, their gazes cold.
“Storm is comin’ now” the captain says. He is the worst, because in his eyes there is regret. Compassion. Pity. He doesn’t want to do it. Not like the others do. But that won’t stop him.
“Told your father a ship is no place for a girl,” he says. “Told ‘im to find another vessel, told ‘im to just keep you home, if e’ had ta. But did he listen? If you want someone to blame, miss, blame him. Tha ocean is cold, cold and cruel. And she ain’t gonna let us through this without payment, without a cost.”
The wind blows his gray hair back from his face, and he nods at one of the crewman - the one who’s eyes always linger on her for too long - and he steps forward and jabs Alice in the side with a paddle from one of the rowboats. She cries out, even though she doesn’t want to, even though she wants to scream instead, scream and curse the way a lady of her standing is never meant to do. She wants to curse them all to a watery grave and watch as they suffer.
She tries to move, tries to run past them, to break the rope binding her legs at the ankles through sheer power of will. She fails.
The crewman jabs at her again, and she spits at him. The glob of saliva hits him on the face, spittle clinging to his sun-tanned skin. His crewmates laugh.
Alice realizes her mistake too late.
His eyes darken, he steps forward - and he strikes her across the face with the paddle so hard she’s twisted around, so hard she sees black and careens of the gangplank and plummets to the dark, thrashing water below.
The captain was right: the sea is cold. Colder than any hell she’s ever imagined. Colder than the time she fell face first into a deep puddle on the street in the dead of winter. She feels the ice flood her mouth, fill her lungs, turn every vein and bone bitter blue with frost. She can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t move.
The water tosses her against the hull of the ship and she feels her skull crack against the worn wood. The world fades, and she begins to die…
She remembers the sea, through the darkness. Remembers tossing her friend Lydia into the waves at the beach, remembers their laughter as Lydia pulled her in as well. She remembers dunking her head under, feeling the rush of cold fill her up as she became lighter than she’d ever been, became part of the water.
‘The sea is cold,’ she remembers the captain saying. Yes, she thinks, but I am colder.
And the ocean? she realizes. The ocean is her sister.
She feels it filling her up, feels it caressing her body, enveloping her. Not killing her, but cradling her. A sister holding up her own blood, a mother, soothing her wailing child, kissing the hurt away. A goddess, hearing the prayers of her devoted believer, and answering them.
I have salt and seawater in my soul, Captain. I will show you how cold these waters can be.
She feels the edges of her body fading, feels herself stop being a me and become a we, become an us, become every drop of water and every clump of foam and every weed and every wave. Feels herself changing.
Her dress is pulled away by the waves, button by button, seam by seam. The sea strips her, soothes her skin. She feels herself swaying, feels her injuries healing. Feels herself become something more than a scared girl or a single spot of death in a pool of life, as her body flares like a fire, as her legs brush together, as they begin to fuse…
She feels herself heal, and she feels herself change.
When it is over, she is bare, but she feels no shame. Her tail twists in the water beneath her, swaying, more natural than her legs ever felt. Stronger, too. She runs her hand over the dark blue scales, the same shade as the surface in a storm. She feels herself smile.
Siren, she thinks, mermaid. Sister of the sea.
The captain was right; a ship is no place for a woman. This is the place for a woman.
And when she drags him screaming down into it, he will realize: the ocean may be cruel…but her sisters are worse.
Alice smiles again, and begins to swim after the ship fading into the distance.
Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
The Anatomy of a mermaid
yes, thanks.
i hate when people draws mermaid’s tail like it was some sort of goddamn suit on normal human legs like this:
it just doesnt work
yeah we wouldnt want to make our mermaids too unrealistic
this asks more questions than it answers. they don’t really have vestigial legs, like those aren’t even motile fins, so why do they still have fully formed hips, why hasn’t the pelvic bone changed significantly? and where did the tail come from?
whales as we know them evolved from land animals that went back out to sea, and it’s all spine all the way down to the tail fin. the pelvis is vestigial to the point of being tiny and unrecognizable, and the rear leg structure is //gone//. and by the time they evolved all that, their forelegs had turned into proper fins and they didn’t have hourglass figures, because they built up walls of insulating fat and blubber where it was needed most - around the vital organs.
which brings us to the walrus. as you can see the skeletal structure and the external appearance are fairly ursiform - the rear legs are basically still in there forming the tail, and the pelvis is intact, and above that it may as well still be a land animal. if mermaids did exist, as hominids who went back out to sea, and if they hadn’t evolved into basically dolphins, then a walrus skeletal system, complete with vestigial thigh bones inside a kind of muscle skirt, and with significant fat and blubber deposits //on the main body// would be most likely. which is to say, mermaids with human torsos and seagoing lower bodies would waddle around on their tails, have clearly defined thigh structures, and would be a hell of a lot rounder above and about the waist than they’re usually depicted.
which begs the question, then, if you see a mermaid and it’s a skinny little thing with a slinky waist and an eel-like tail and a perfect bosom and a coy smile, //why does it look like that//? because whatever that is? it is not a land animal that readapted to the sea. it is not your distant kin. it is a sea creature that adapted //to get your attention//.
maybe it’s all an illusion, a frilly mane, an hourglass shape, and narrow antennae that mimic the shape of human arms, waving lonely sailors into the water, only to realize too late the bioluminescent patterns of lipstick and pert breasts are to distract from what lies behind them - viselike jaws and row after row of stiletto teeth.
or maybe it’s all soft tissue, the gelatinous bell of a jellyfish folded into a pleasing shape, luring the unwary down to be caught up in a tail that is nothing more than thousands of barbed lines of stinging neurotoxin cells.
or it could be that the tail goes deep into a shadowy well, and the beautiful woman is a mask for a single enormous jaw, the internal skeleton just the endless spine and ribs of a vast and hungry sea snake.
or, perhaps most terrifyingly, the face is real but not the face of the eyes looking out of it - a human mask for an intelligence both cold and calculating, wearing an inviting smile to bring you within reach of the dagger behind it’s back. waiting to slice the skin off of you because it needs a new disguise, because it is shaped like you but does not look like you, because it must pass as you so it can go among you, so that by starlight it may go on land and into town, where your kin are sleeping, unsuspecting.
I bet mermaids are really great astronomers. I mean, their eyes must be super sensitive to light if they can see underwater, and there’s no place with clearer skies than the open ocean.
What if they found navigational equipment from sunken explorers’ ships and turned the old telescope designs and star charts into something more compatible with their habitat? Optics made of polished sea-glass, extraterrestrial communications systems based on the languages of different sea creatures, etc.
People on land talk about how they know as little about the oceans as they do about outer space, but merfolk already have the seas figured out.
So of course, what are they going to explore next? I think the answer is just as clear as it is awesome.
Mermaids by sully-s
woc mermaid gang for life
OH MY GOD THIS IS AMAZING
I want someone to write a book where Mermaids are the women thrown off ships when the sailors got afraid because having a woman on the boat is bad luck. And as they sink to the bottom, legs tied together, they change slowly until they can breathe, until they can use their tied up legs to swim. And they drown sailors in revenge, luring them in by singing in their husky voices still stinging from the salt water they breathed.
someone please write this
Hang on a minute…
Shouldn’t all mermaids be fat?
Mermaids are probably mammals, because of their visible breast tissue and horizontal tail fins.
Aquatic mammals need to have developed a thick layer of subcutaneous fat in order to survive in water. Even in a hot climate, swimming in water the whole time would require fatty insulation.
So… chubby mermaids. Yeah.
Keep reblogging this, it is making male mermaid enthusiasts angry.
by Renee Nault on Tumblr!