Pencil drawing of a mermaid with long, wind-swept hair curling upward and a scaled tail, in fine line style, with no body placement shown.

Mermaid with flowing hair

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A small mermaid is drawn in profile, looking upward, with her long hair streaming above her head in tapering, wave-like strands. Her arms are outstretched and her fishtail curves down through the lower half of the image, with individual scales shaded along it. The fine pencil linework and soft grey shading are set against a plain white background.

Fine line Mermaid Hair Tail Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Hythe swore he had seen her go under the gates at dawn, but Dad said that man would swear to anything before his tea. We were moored three boats back from the bridge, Lily's washing strung between the cabin roof and a stick of willow, and I had been told to keep my hands out of the water. I didn't, of course. Nobody who grows up on a narrowboat keeps their hands out of anything.

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The river at Hythe runs the wrong way on wet mornings. Mum said the tide reached that far up once, a hundred years back, and the water never forgot the habit. On the third morning of the flood I saw a tail in the brown water below the sluice, its scales catching the light like a handful of dropped spoons. Then a face came up, sharp-chinned and pale, and her hair spread out across the surface in long grey ribbons that lifted and curled the way hair does when there is no wind to stop it.

She didn't speak. She looked up past me at the sky, as if she were waiting for something to come down out of it, and her arms went out to either side like a woman steadying herself on a plank. I wanted to tell someone. But who would I tell? Dad would say I'd been at the gin in Mum's cupboard, and Lily would only want to know whether she could have a go at the hair.

I went back the next morning with a heel of the good bread from the bakery in town. The sluice was quiet. Only the hair was there, snagged on the iron rail where the gate meets the wall, drying in the sun in pale grey coils. I took one strand, thin as cotton, and tucked it in my pocket. It is still there. On nights when the boat rocks against the bank I put my hand in and feel it lift.