Pencil drawing of a traditional-style mermaid draped over an anchor, framed by flowers and rope, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid and anchor design sketch

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a mermaid with long flowing hair resting over an anchor, with a rope wrapped around the shank. Flower heads and leaves fill the upper left and lower right, and a heart-shaped motif with dotted detail sits at the base of the anchor. The linework is uniform and shading is absent, so the drawing reads as a black and grey outline for a tattoo.

Traditional Mermaid Anchor Rope Flower Hair Heart Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had already been hauled up the slip by the time Maud Keary unfolded her drawing on the bonnet of the harbourmaster's cart, the paper gone soft at the creases from a week in her apron pocket. Tom Rowse squinted at it, then at the iron, then at her. "You want the lass sitting on the flukes," he said. "Hair down over the shank like she's combing out the weed." Maud nodded. The rope was where the cable had been, wound three times round the stock, and the flowers in the top corner were her mother's, copied from a lace collar that had never once been worn outside the house.

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He pointed at the heart at the bottom. "That's a grave marker, that is." She let him think so. The Hesper had gone onto the Dodman in March with her father aboard and her anchor still down in the bay, which was the only reason the crew had lived, the cable paying out until the hull broke its back. Rowse had fished the anchor up himself that summer and kept it in his yard for the parish to argue over.

"It's not holding her down," Maud said. "Look at her hands. She's keeping it from going any deeper."

Rowse rubbed his jaw and said nothing for a long while. Then he went to get his tools and the pencil marks, the careful even outline, were scratched into the iron by sunset, every line the same weight as her father's rope knots.

The drawing went back into her apron. Nobody in Porthgwidden ever saw it again, but at high water, when the tide came slapping over the slip and the anchor was lit gold by the lamp in the cooper's window, Maud would stand on the wall and count the flowers without looking.