Three close photographs of a black fine line mermaid tattoo with dark hair and a fish tail, with a small green and red accent, on a forearm or upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Line drawn mermaid tattoo in three views

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised mermaid with dark hair and a fish tail, drawn with a single weight black outline, with a rectangular shape at the top linked to the figure by a thin line. Three panels show the same design from slightly different angles and lighting, with the skin tone and curve of the limb visible. Mostly black linework with tiny green and red accents, and no shading.

Fine line Other Mermaid Figure Fish tail Hair Line art

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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

Sit down, sit down, the four-fifteen is never on time and neither was my grandmother. You want the mermaid on the telegraph wire. Everyone at Ashby Road has seen her, provided they looked up at the right moment, which is never the moment you are looking.

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She came in with the autumn tides, Edwin Pryce always said, when the harbour at Saltry backed up into the cutting and platform two stood an inch deep in brine. Nobody sent her. She simply appeared on the wire between the signal box and the water tower, holding a telegram form in both hands like a lady at the opera holding a fan. Her tail hung down over the gutter. Her hair was long and black and went wherever the wind did. The form was always blank, and she was always very cross about it.

Edwin tried to answer her. He tapped out the Morse for good morning, for where are you from, for would you like tea, and each time she folded the blank paper into a small hard square and dropped it in the rain barrel. Then the great frost came, the wire went white and snapped on the third of January, and the mermaid was gone with it.

The lineman who mended it found a single black hair caught on the insulator and a scale no bigger than a thumbnail. Edwin kept both in a matchbox. That night he sent one telegram down the line to Saltry, the only words he ever wrote on a form that wasn't blank: Come back by the tide train. Platform two. I have brought my own paper.

Now listen, because this is the bit I came to tell you. The tide train runs in at twenty past midnight, and if you stand under the clock with the lamps out, you can see something on the wire, a small pale figure with a square of paper, reading it very slowly to herself.