Coloured flash design of a mermaid with curly teal hair, an anchor, rope and pink flowers in a neo-traditional style, shown on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with anchor and flowers design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a mermaid with voluminous curled teal hair, holding a rope that loops down to a red and gold anchor. Pink and orange flowers with green leaves frame the figure at the top and bottom. Bold dark outlines, flat fills and fine hatched details define the forms, set against a plain cream background.

Neo-trad Traditional Mermaid Anchor Rope Flower Leaves Hair Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold that rope steady, lad, or the tide will have the pair of us before the kettle's on. There. Now sit close, because this is the bit my own gran told me in the dark, with the lamp turned low so the sea couldn't hear.

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Forty winters back, the Mary Calder went down off Kettla Skerry with her anchor still hooked to a ring of rope and nobody left aboard to cut it free. The men were lost, the boat was lost, and the anchor settled in the weed like a sleeping gull. Ishbel lived in the cove under the skerry, and she was the only one who came to look at it. She had hair the colour of shallow water and a temper to match, and she did not care for men who dropped their gear where it would tangle her sisters.

So she did what any sensible sea creature does with a mess. She coiled the rope round her arm, hauled the anchor up a fathom at a time, and carried it to the one place on the coast where the seabed was clean and the current would not drag it again. Every spring she came back, and every spring the rope had sprouted something new. Pink thrift climbed the twists. Sea campion crept into the loops. By the third year the rusted flukes wore a skirt of orange poppies, and the lobster boats gave that stretch of water a wide berth out of respect.

The turn, lad, is that nobody ever saw her take the rope from the fishermen. They only saw the flowers. And on the morning the Calder's widows came down to the pier to look, there was a tin of tea sitting on the bollard with a note tucked under the lid, and it said only, Mind the knot. Now pass me the lamp.