Black line drawing flash of a mermaid holding an anchor wrapped in rope, with long flowing hair and a curled tail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with anchor and rope flash

Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a mermaid with long, flowing hair holding an anchor, with a thick rope coiled around her body and the anchor. The linework is clean and uniform with no shading, and the tail curls at the bottom of the composition. The drawing is set on a plain grey background with no colour.

Mermaid Anchor Rope Hair Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's slick with the morning's slime. Right, you'll want to sit where the nets are dry. Now, my father swore this happened off the Dogger in the year the herring came in so thick the boats sank low in the water. He was mending twine on the stern of the Margaret Ann when he heard her singing, and he told it to me so many times I could hear the boom of the swell under every line of it.

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She came up alongside with her hair spread out on the water like weed, and she had an anchor hooked against her chest as if she'd dragged it up from the bottom herself. Rope wound round her and round the iron, thick as a man's wrist, and it was rope from a boat, not from the sea, because my father saw the tar on it and the faded red whipping where a hand had spliced it. Somebody had lost her. Somebody had cut her loose and she'd kept the thing.

He asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted the anchor carried back to the harbour wall at Whitby, where a girl named Ellen Harrow had once stood waving a shawl until the tide took the fleet out of sight. My father said he would, if she would tell him where the rope ended. She laughed and showed him her tail, curling down into the dark like a coil of wet line, and he saw that the rope went all the way down with it and did not end at all.

He carried the anchor in, of course. He set it against the harbour wall that same week and it's there still, rusted to the colour of old blood. Ellen Harrow's shawl is folded in the church. And every spring, when the herring come, somebody in this village ties a red whipping onto the net-loft door, and we don't ask why.