Black ink line drawing of a mermaid with octopus tentacles and flowing hair, a neo-traditional style tattoo design on torn grey paper.

Mermaid and octopus flash design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a mermaid with long wavy hair and a fish-like tail, with octopus tentacles wrapping around her body and curling through her hair. It is drawn in clean, even black linework with no shading, on a torn sheet of grey paper beside a black marker pen. The composition fills the page with the figure centred and the tail and tentacles extending outwards.

Neo-trad Mermaid Octopus Tentacle Hair Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Harrow had been counting the lamps along Quay Street for an hour when the ink on her palm started to run. The night market at Saltcombe Basin was pulling its shutters down one by one, and the gulls had given up. She had come for the late ferry that never sailed on Tuesdays, because her brother's boat was overdue and the tide table said it should have been in by now.

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The harbourmaster's log hung on a board in the lamp room, and she read the last entry twice. Skiff Marigold, two aboard, no signal past the Ness. Beside it someone had sketched a small neat figure in pencil: a woman with weed for hair and arms that ran off the margin like ropes. Nell knew the hand. Her grandmother had drawn exactly that on the back of every tide chart she ever filled in, and always said it was nothing to worry about.

Down on the slipway the water lay black and perfectly still, which was wrong for a Tuesday. Something moved beneath the steps, a slow loop of pale suckers among the weed, then a second, then a whole crown of them lifting out of the dark. The woman who rose after them had her hair full of curling arms and her tail laid flat on the stones, and she studied Nell the way a fishwife studies a customer who has come to haggle.

"Your brother owes me a rope," she said. "Bring it back on the turn and I'll bring him home." Nell walked back up the slipway with the rope coiled over her shoulder and did not open the log again. As she passed the dock post, the arms slid round it without a sound, unhurried, as if tying a knot she would be expected to finish.