Black and grey traditional flash line drawing of a mermaid holding a baby with a flower, seated on a wooden-beamed anchor with rope, shown without a body placement.

Mermaid and baby on an anchor

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a mermaid with long wavy hair and a shell-shaped headpiece, cradling a small baby who holds a flower. She sits on a wooden crossbar of an anchor, with a coiled rope looping through its ring and a scaled fish tail curling behind her. The bold outlines are filled with fine interior detailing on the tail and anchor, with no shading or colour.

Traditional Mermaid Anchor Rope Flower Shell Fish tail Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The anchor had been lying in Pelham's yard since the spring gale, and nobody in Porthgwidden could say how it had got up onto the quay wall with a mermaid sitting on it. Morwen came up each evening at the turn of the tide. She brought her daughter Sefa, who was too young to swim out past the breakwater and too stubborn to be left behind, and who held a sea-pink plucked from the cliff garden as though it were the most valuable thing in the county.

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Pelham the chandler disliked her being there. He was a practical man who believed in chains, shackles and sensible hours, and he said so every evening from his doorway with a mug of stewed tea going cold in his hand. One night he climbed the wall with his good knife to cut the coiled rope looping through the anchor's ring, because a loose line on a quay was a drowning waiting to happen. The blade skated off the hemp as if the rope had been spun from something harder than sense.

Morwen only laughed and said the rope was the one her husband had tied the night the herring boats went out and did not come home, and that it would hold until somebody had a better reason to let it go. Sefa, who was not interested in rope, leaned out over the crossbar and dropped her flower into the harbour. The water took it at once and carried it out past the breakwater, bobbing and turning, until the grey light swallowed it.

Pelham did not sleep well. In the morning he went down to the wall expecting to find the rope cut and the anchor gone. Instead he found the rope still knotted through the ring and, tucked in the crack where the wood met the iron, a single sea-pink, dry and fresh, as if it had been picked that minute. He left it there and went to open the shop.