Black ink line drawing of a mermaid with a long, flowing tail curling upwards past rising bubbles, shown as a fine line tattoo design with no body placement.

Mermaid tail with rising bubbles line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A reclining mermaid is drawn in single black ink lines, with her head and flowing hair at the lower left and her long tail sweeping up and around the page. Thin, tapering strokes form the fins and the wavy edges of the tail, while small circles rise as bubbles above and beside it. The composition is open and white, with the design running diagonally from bottom left to top right.

Fine line Mermaid Tail Bubble Hair Wave Fin

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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

The air pump in the mermaid tank coughed twice, then gave up, and the bubbles that had been rising in a steady ribbon thinned to a few fat drops. Iris kicked off from the glass with her tail trailing and counted them the way her mother had taught her to count stitches. Eleven. Twelve. Beyond the curtain the band was playing the same waltz it had played since Skegness, and the sound came down the tent poles like rain.

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Mr Pettigrew had sold the lion cage in August and the camel in September. Last week he sold the gaslamp off the ticket booth and the boy who used to work the wheel. Tonight the crowd numbered thirty at most, and half of them were sheltering from the wind rather than paying for a look at the fish-woman. He tapped on the glass with his cane. "Bit of drama, Iris. Turn over. Show them the fins."

She didn't turn. She hung where the one working lamp made the water look like bottle glass, and let her hair drift up toward the surface like weed, the way it had in the sea off Bridlington when she was small and her father taught her to hold her breath. The tail had been painted by a man who had never seen the sea, all green sequins and wire ribs. Still, when the pump stopped for good, the bubbles that were left rose by themselves, slow and separate, climbing past the lamp toward the canvas roof.

Pettigrew watched the last one reach the tent flap and vanish. "Right," he said, quietly now. "Right, then." Iris unhooked the tail at the ankle the way she had done every night for nine years, folded it over the rail like a wet coat, and climbed out into the cold. Behind her the water settled. She wrapped a towel around her shoulders and walked out past the empty stalls toward the sea, which had never once asked her to perform.