Pencil drawing of a mermaid with long hair seated on a ship's anchor whose top forms a heart, shown as a flash design.

Mermaid and heart anchor design

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with long flowing hair and pointed ears sits on an anchor, looking over her shoulder with one hand raised to the anchor's heart-shaped top. The linework is fine and detailed, with fish-scale shading on the tail and soft pencil shading on the body and anchor. The design is drawn in a single blue-purple pencil tone on a white background, with the tail extending down the page.

Mermaid Anchor Heart Tail Scale Long hair Pin-up

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the lamp, Tomas, the wick's gone soft and I'll not have you singeing your eyebrows like your uncle did. Sit where I can see your hands. Good. Now listen, because this is the bit they never tell the tourists at the Ship Inn.

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Ada Penrose mended nets on the quay at Porthkerris the year the herring went deep. Her man, Eli Varcoe, was bosun on the Mary Gale, and he was the sort who could tie a bowline in the dark and still swear he'd lost his way home. He had the anchor on the Gale's bow made new that spring, and when the smith asked what shape the ring should be, Eli said a heart, so she'd always know which way to look for him.

The autumn gale took the Gale off the Lizard with all hands. Ada went down to the harbour wall at every dusk after, her palm flat on the cold iron of the ring, and the lamps of the fleet came in one by one without her. Then, in the third week of the dark months, a woman climbed the slipway steps with water running off a tail of scales, pointed ears under her hair, and a bone comb in one fist. She did not speak. She only turned her back, looked over one shoulder at the bay, and waited.

Ada understood. She had given the sea her husband, so the sea would have to give him back, and the sea was a poor bargainer but a fair one. Three nights later the Gale's lantern came round the headland, low in the water, and Eli stood in the bow with his hand raised toward the heart, alive and shaking. Some say the woman still sits on the wall. I say she only watches, the way you'd watch a child you had lent something to.