Black and grey drawing of a mermaid with swirling hair, a scaled tail and curling waves, presented as a tattoo design.

Mermaid with flowing hair and waves

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid reaches out with one arm while her long hair flows upward and curls into ribbon-like loops. Her tail is shaded with fine scale texture and ends in stylised waves that curl at the base. The design is drawn in black and grey on a plain white background, with soft shading across the hair and body.

Mermaid Hair Wave Tail Scale

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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

The customs hut at the Skerra crossing sits on stilts above the tideline, and by the second week of October you know every boat by the sound of its engine. Tonight it is the grey launch from Vardøy, its paperwork already soft at the corners. You take the clipboard from the skipper, a man named Olaf Rask who never once looks at your face, and you begin the list: crates of lamp oil, two sacks of salt, a sealed box that knocks against the pier every time the hull rises.

Keep reading

The box is the thing you were told to watch for. The manifest calls it sea glass for a church window, but the label is in a hand you recognise from the old harbour ledgers, and the rattle inside is too regular for glass. You lift the lid with the blade of your pen. Wrapped in oilcloth is a bronze figurehead no longer than your forearm: a woman with hair streaming upward in long curled ribbons, one arm reaching out past the edge of the wood as if to draw the whole grey sea after her.

Rask says nothing. The wind catches the oilcloth and for a moment the hair seems to lift off the metal and loop toward the lamps. You stamp the form Cleared, then write in the margin, Not for export, returned to owner, and push the box back across the wet planks. Take her home, you say. He nods, tucks the figurehead under one arm, and goes down the ramp. Out past the breakwater the water has begun to turn silver, and the scaled tail catches the light as the launch pulls away.