Black line drawing of an Art Nouveau style mermaid with flowing hair, surrounded by octopus tentacles and a lettered circular border, as a tattoo design.

Art Nouveau mermaid with octopus tentacles

Black and grey · Flash

A seated mermaid with long, flowing hair holds a drape of fabric while her fish tail curls downward. Octopus tentacles with spiral suckers wrap around her and fill the sides of an oval frame, and lettering runs along the arch at the top. The drawing uses uniform black outlines on a white background with no shading, and the composition is symmetrical and decorative.

Mermaid Octopus Tentacle Long hair Fish tail Lettering Swirl Scroll Oval frame

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the council filled in the dock, the women of Shipley Row said there was a mermaid in the black water behind the bins, and that she had eight arms because she had given the other two to the tide. When Greave House went up on the old quay in 1968, nobody thought to ask her leave.

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The lifts stopped first. Then the pipes began to sing at night, low, like someone humming through a shell. Tomas Quill, who had the flat on the ninth floor and a wife on nights at the laundry, took a torch down to the car park where the water came back through the drains every spring. He found her sitting on an upturned crate with her tail folded under her and her arms wound round the pillars, holding up the cracked footings the way a woman holds a shawl against the wind.

She asked him for a name. He had none to give her that wasn't already spoken for, so he gave her the one from the brass plate on his father's boat, the only thing he had kept from the harbour. She wrote it along the top of the arch in her own fine, curling letters, and by morning the lifts were running again.

Every spring after, the tide climbed the drains and reached the ninth floor landing and went no further. Tomas kept a tin of salt on the sill and left the stairwell window open a crack. When the children asked why the tiles were scrolled with weed, he told them to mind the water and leave the bins alone, and he always put the kettle on before the lift doors sighed open for her.