Black and grey pencil drawing of a mermaid with wind-swept hair, a shell top and a curling wave-shaped tail, shown as a tattoo design.

Mermaid with flowing hair and wave tail

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with long hair blown into loose, swirling curls, wearing a shell top and with her arms outstretched. Her scaled tail is shaded with fine crosshatching, and it ends in a large, curling wave shape. The drawing uses soft graphite shading on a plain white background.

Mermaid Hair Tail Wave Shell Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Cwm Hafod had seen the sea, though everyone knew it lay beyond the Gap, past three ridges of grey stone. What they knew of it came from the carters, who said the water moved like hair in a wind, and that the women who lived in it would sing a man down onto the rocks if he lingered on the shore too long.

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Tegan Morris went up the pass in the autumn of the great snow with a basket of bread for her brother, who had taken the sheep over the top and not come back. She found him at the cairn above the tarn, sitting upright, his coat soaked through though no rain had fallen. Beside him the water had risen into a tall curl, the way a wave stands before it breaks, and it was turning slowly, letting off a thin tail of spray.

The woman inside the curl looked down at Tegan with eyes the colour of slate. "He wanted to know what was on the other side," she said. "Everyone does." Her hair streamed out sideways over the peaks as though a gale were blowing through it, and the tail beneath her ended in three great coils of water that folded and unfolded like the shawls the drovers sold at the autumn fair.

Tegan did not ask for her brother back. She asked for the road. The woman laughed, and the sound ran down the valley like a spill of pebbles. By morning the tarn was dry to its stones, and the sheep were grazing on the far slope with the lambs at their sides. Her brother never spoke of the pass again, but every spring a shell turned up on the cairn, and the shepherds of Cwm Hafod carried it down to the village and set it on the windowsill for luck.