Black and white line drawing of a mermaid silhouette with flowing hair and a curling tail, surrounded by bubbles, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with bubbles tattoo design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a mermaid sits in profile, with long flowing hair rising above her and her tail curving around the lower half of the composition. Bold outlines and open white space form the waves of hair and tail, while circles of varying sizes and small scattered bubbles fill the background. The design is entirely black and white, with a balanced, circular composition.

Mermaid Bubble Hair Tail Wave

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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

By the third week of the leak you can tell the building's moods by its pipes. Flat 41 hums like a kettle that never boils. Flat 9 knocks twice, then stops, as if someone has thought better of it. You are fourteen floors up with a torch and a roll of gaffer tape, because the caretaker has gone to Margate and nobody else on the estate will climb the stairs for a drip.

Keep reading

The source is not in any pipe. You follow the damp along the landing wall to the old chute cupboard, where the paint has blistered into a pale patch the size of a dinner plate. Someone scratched into it years ago: a woman with a tail that curls back on itself, hair lifting like weed. Under the scratches the plaster is cold, and when you press your palm to it you hear water moving on the other side, slow, like something turning over in its sleep.

You don't tell anyone what you hear. You sit on the top step with your back against the cupboard door and watch bubbles of wet paint rise under the skin of the wall, round and separate, each one swelling and bursting into a small dark ring. By dawn the drip has stopped. Downstairs the lift opens for the first time that week, and a boy from flat 9 steps out with a plastic fish in each hand, shouting that the sea has come up to the bins.

You go down to see. The car park is a shallow grey lagoon, and the wheelie bins float like buoys. Nobody else is looking up. Only you notice the cupboard door on the fourteenth floor swing shut, slow and certain, as if someone very patient has finished with the wall.