Solid black silhouette design of a mermaid with flowing hair, swirling curls and a long fin-like tail on a cream background, shown as tattoo flash with no body placement.

Mermaid silhouette flash design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a mermaid with windswept hair, curled scrollwork at the head, waist and tail, and a long tapering tail that curls at the end. The design uses bold, smooth outlines and flat black fills with thin white lines separating the tail fins. It is a single-colour drawing centred on a plain cream background.

Blackwork Mermaid Silhouette Hair Tail Swirl Scrollwork Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage drops again before your tea has cooled, and your father's boots are still steaming on the step where he kicked them off. Down the shaft the candle in your fist gutters each time the pump engine on the cliff sighs and pulls. Your job is to count the strokes and shout them up the ladder to Mam, who keeps the tally in chalk on the kitchen slate. Forty-one. Forty-two. The number always climbs when the sea is restless.

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The water came through the old workings at Wheal Clemmow last winter, and the men swore they heard singing under the lapping. You don't believe them until you go down the adit alone, the candle hot in your hand and the cold rising past your ankles, cold as a blade. Something turns beyond the light. A tail, scales dark as wet slate, fins fanned thin and white as the lines a pen leaves when it lifts. Then hair, lifting and curling in the current like smoke that refuses to rise.

She curls one arm at her waist, the way Mam lifts the kettle, and points with the other at a seam of tin glinting in the rock above. Then she tips her head toward the pump house as though asking you to stop it. You tell her you can't, that the engine keeps the men breathing and the water out of the stopes. She laughs, a sound like a bell rung underwater, and the candle goes out. When you feel your way back to the ladder, a single white fin brushes your palm.

Next morning the engine stands silent for the first time in living memory. The men go down, come up grinning, and the seam is there, bright as a coin. Your father presses a lump of tin into your hand, smooth and curled at one end like a wave that has decided to stop. You keep it in your pocket. Some nights, lying awake, you hear the pump sigh again far off, and you count the strokes with her, one, two, sliding down into the dark.