Pencil sketch of a curling fish or mermaid tail with scalloped scales and fanned fins, drawn in black and grey on a sketchbook page.

Curling fish or mermaid tail pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a curling tail with a scalloped scale pattern along its body and a fanned fin at the base. The linework is clean and outlined, with light sketch lines and shading showing construction marks. The drawing is black and grey on an off-white sketchbook page, with the spiral binding visible along the right edge.

Fish tail Scale Fin Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hold of the Marguerite Lowe smelled of tar and wet rope, and the ship's cook had sworn the flying fish were getting bolder. You stood at the rail on the fourth night out from Falmouth, watching the phosphorescence pour off the bow, when the mate came up beside you with a tin mug of rum and a face like a shut door. He said the boy from Bristol had gone over the side during the squall, and nobody had seen whether he'd been pulled or had jumped. You didn't ask which. You had your own ledger of things you'd rather not say aloud.

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He handed you the mug and nodded toward the wake, where something pale kept pace with the stern, rising and sinking in the swell. It was a fin, you thought, or a long curl of foam, until it rolled and showed you the scalloped edge of a tail, every scale laid over the last like the shingles on a church roof. Your grandmother used to say the sea keeps a tally of the men it takes and pays them back in strange shapes. You had laughed at her for that once. You did not laugh now.

In the morning the wake was empty and the boy's sea chest was already sold to a Portuguese bosun for two shillings and a pipe. You kept the mug. Years later, when the Lowe was broken up in Plymouth, you still turned it over in your hands on dark watches, feeling for the curve of something that had almost come home.