Black and grey fine line tattoo of a mermaid with curly hair and a raised arm, with a fishtail, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of a mermaid with swirling curls for hair, one arm raised above her head, and a long fishtail tapering downward. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The design runs vertically along a pale forearm against a dark background, and the photograph is shot in black and white.

Fine line Forearm Mermaid Curl Outline Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flood had come up over the low meadow in the night, and by first light the ewes were standing on the hummock like wet bollards, bawling at me as if I had caused it. Dad had gone to Hexham for feed and left me the lambing shed, the cracked ice on the trough and a list written on the back of a feed receipt. I was on the third item when my boot knocked against something under the willow by the drain.

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It was a green bottle, stoppered with a cork gone black, and inside it a sheet of paper rolled tight as a cigarette. I knew the hand before I had the cork out. Nan wrote the way she sang, every letter looping back on itself. The drawing was a woman with one arm lifted over her head, her hair coiled into curls like the spring of an old clock, and her tail running down and tapering to a point at the edge of the page. Underneath, in pencil: For whoever keeps the water out.

Nan left the coast at seventeen and never went back, though she talked about the tide the way other people talked about a difficult cousin. She dug this drain herself the winter Grandad broke his leg, and I had always thought of it as a straight, sensible ditch. Standing in the water now, I could see from the bank that it bent in a slow spiral before it met the beck, the way her hair curled. Whatever she had been trying to tell the land, the land had listened.

I dried the paper on the Aga rail, rolled it again and carried it back out to the willow. I slid it into the bottle, pushed the cork down hard and set it on the root where the water would find it. Then I went to see to the ewes, and the flood, for the first time that winter, seemed to be draining away from them.