Pencil sketch of a mermaid with shell and starfish tattoo designs on both upper arms and forearms, drawn in red and blue on kraft paper.

Mermaid tattoo design sketch

Upper arm · Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of a mermaid with flowing red hair, a side-glancing eye and a finned blue tail. Her arms carry sleeve-style designs of shells, starfish and small flourishes, drawn in blue pencil. Red and blue pencil lines sit on a plain tan kraft paper background, with the composition centred on the figure.

Upper arm Forearm Mermaid Shell Starfish Hair Tail Sleeve Sketch Pencil drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum always said the ornamental pond at Holcombe Hall was only a foot deep, so nobody under ten should be left alone beside it. I was twelve the summer the gardeners drained it for re-lining, and I was the one who found her, a red-haired thing caught in the silt among broken pots and a rusted watering can.

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She wasn't dead, only sulking. Her tail had gone the colour of a wet slate roof, and her fins were torn at the edges where the liner had snagged her. She looked at me sideways, one eye narrowed, as if I were the one who had got myself into trouble. "Shells," she said, "not starfish. Get me shells. The starfish are for show."

So every afternoon that August I climbed over the wall with a biscuit tin and a trowel and brought her whatever I could dig up from the flowerbeds: a whelk from the rockery, a pearl button from Gran's cardigan, a sliver of blue glass off the potting shed step. She stuck them to her arms with paste made from breadcrumbs and spit, and the sleeves grew brighter every day, until old Mr Pryce stopped on the gravel and asked who I was talking to.

On the last morning the men came back with the new liner, and she slid off the lip of the silt into the thin water running down the drain. "You'll have to lie about me," she said. "Say you dreamt it." I did. Years later I still can't pass a sundial without looking for the glint of a button under the moss.