Traditional flash drawing of a mermaid with long dark hair seated on an anchor and rope, holding a small cherub, in red, yellow and black outline on a tan background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid and anchor traditional flash

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A long-haired mermaid sits on a wooden-topped anchor wrapped in rope, holding a small cherub who offers a red heart. Her fish tail with red fins curls around the shank of the anchor. Bold black outlines, flat red, yellow and tan fills and simple shading give it a classic traditional look, set on a parchment-coloured background with a playing card style '1Q' in the bottom corner.

Traditional Mermaid Anchor Rope Cherub Heart Fish tail Hair Playing card

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor came up off Spurn Head with a woman's hair caught in its flukes, and Tom Garrow swore it was the third time that winter the sea had sent him a bargain. He cut the hair free with his knife, the way his father had taught him, but it kept winding back round his wrist like wet weed. When the mate hauled the last fathom, a small bare-skinned boy with wings no longer than a gull's feathers was clinging to the wooden stock, and beside him sat the mermaid herself, her red-finned tail hooked round the shank.

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She did not let go of the child. "He's mine to carry," she said, in the flat voice of a woman reading out a tide table, "until someone takes what he's offering." The boy held up a red heart no bigger than a thimble. Eli, the youngest hand, reached for it before anyone could stop him, and the mermaid's hair rose from her shoulders like a cloud of gulls. Tom saw the heart was warm, and that it beat once against Eli's palm.

Tom did not take it. He sent the men to the capstan instead, and he sat on the wet deck with his hand flat on the rope until the mermaid's eyes met his across the anchor. Then he lowered the iron back into the grey water, slowly, a fathom at a time, and let the cherub slide off the stock with his heart held high. The boy laughed as he went under, and the heart went down after him, a red spark fading into the dark.

The Margaret made Hull that week with every man aboard, Eli included, and the rope stayed slack in the bilge for the rest of the voyage. Nobody ever asked Tom what he had given for it.