Flash design of a tattooed mermaid holding a skull, with an anchor, stars and a crescent moon above her head and tentacles coiled around her tail, in cream ink on a dark teal background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with anchor, skull and crescent moon

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A mermaid with long dark hair sits in the centre of the design, her torso tattooed and one arm raised to hold a skull. An anchor, a crescent moon and small stars sit above her head, and a tentacle or octopus arm wraps around her fishtail, which is drawn with scale detail. The linework is cream on a dark teal ground, with fine shading on the scales and hair and sweeping swirls of water framing the figure.

Neo-trad Mermaid Anchor Skull Crescent moon Star Tentacle Octopus Fish scale Wave Tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Aunt Morwenna, the Kittiwake is back in Newlyn with her hold full of pollack and a crack in her mainmast nobody has yet agreed to mend. I write from the net loft because the rain has got into the wireless shack and Skipper Tregear says the valves are drowned. You asked whether I had seen anything strange out past the Runnel Stone, and I have not told you the whole of it, so here it is.

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We had been hauling since three in the morning, the swell running long and grey, when the net came up heavy on the port side and Eli Penhallow swore that something had got into the mesh. It was not a shark, and it was not the ghost of old Jago that the boys like to talk about after a pint. It was a woman with hair as dark as tar, sitting up on the wet rail of the gunwale as calm as a bishop, her tail curled round a length of rope like she had been waiting all day for a ride. Round her fishtail was a tentacle, thick as a mooring warp, and it wound up towards her shoulder as if it belonged to her. She held a skull in one hand, grey and small and polished, the way a barber holds a comb.

She did not speak. She looked at the anchor tied on the mast, then at the crescent moon low over the Mount, and she lifted the skull as if toasting us. Then she slid back into the water and the tide closed over her without a ring.

Tregear says we will say nothing at the quayside, and I have said nothing to anyone but you. Keep this under your hat. I am sending you a pound of the pollack for Sunday.

Your loving nephew, Tom