Pencil drawing of a pin-up mermaid with dark wavy hair, red lips and a raised arm, with a small star motif on her chest, on aged paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid pin-up drawing with a star

Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey pencil drawing of a mermaid in a retro pin-up pose, with long wavy dark hair, red lips and one arm raised behind her head. A small star motif sits on her upper chest, and her scaled fish tail curls to the lower left. Shading is soft and sepia-toned against a cream, aged paper background.

Mermaid Pin-up Star Fish tail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora Pike had been drawing the same woman for thirty years, and the paper never seemed to age the way Dora did. Every Thursday she sat at the kitchen table above the chip shop in Scarborough with a 2B pencil and a sheet of cream cartridge gone the colour of weak tea, working on the curl of a tail that never quite came out the same twice. The star on the woman's chest was the only part Dora never shaded. Her husband Frank had drawn it on her first, a sailor's mark he swore would bring a boat home from the Dogger Bank.

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The commission came from Len Hebden, who ran the penny arcade at the end of the pier. He wanted a mermaid for the shutter of his new fortune-telling kiosk, a pin-up with hair like a storm coming in and lips the red of a lifeboat's hull. Dora said she would do it for cash, and that she would not be drawing the star in colour. Len shrugged and said nobody paid for colour in the wind anyway.

She finished on a Tuesday, when the gulls were so loud she had to shut the window. Under the lamp the shadows along the tail seemed deeper than she remembered putting in, as if the scales had been drawn by someone who knew the water well. Len came up the stairs with his hat in his hands, looked at the sheet for a long time, and asked her to sign it. She wrote DP in the corner, then, without meaning to, a tiny star beside the initials.

That night the tide came in unusually high, slapping the pier legs like applause. In the morning Len's kiosk shutter was dry and the drawing was gone from the frame, and on the kitchen table above the chip shop sat a cream sheet, blank except for a single pencilled line, a tail curling toward the window.