Fine line design of a mermaid with long pastel rainbow hair and a teal tail, drawn on a plain white background.

Mermaid with flowing rainbow hair

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A mermaid with her arms raised above her head, her long hair streaming outwards in pastel pink, yellow, lilac and blue strands. Her teal tail curls in a long S-shape at the bottom of the frame. The linework is fine and wispy, with soft shading on the skin and tail, and the figure is centred on a plain white background.

Fine line Mermaid Long hair Tail Scale Figure

Find an artist for this

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 water came down in August, the way it always did when the dry weather held. Dad said the reservoir was shrinking for the first time since 1976, and by the second week the church spire at Little Haddon was standing out of the mud again. Behind the old Pemberton orchard the drowned rows showed their grey trunks, and I walked out between them in my wellingtons with a pail, because Gran had said the windfalls down there would be sweeter than any we picked off the living trees.

Keep reading

Nobody had told me about the hair. It was caught in the lowest branches like wet silk, pink and yellow and a washed-out blue, and it moved though there was no wind. I followed it to the trunk of the biggest tree, where the water still lapped at the knots, and found a woman sitting on the bough with her arms lifted, combing the strands out with her fingers as if she were drying them. Her tail hung down into the silt, teal as a kingfisher, scales shining wherever the light caught them.

"You've come for the apples," she said. Her voice was the sound a tap makes in an empty sink. "They're not yours. Nothing down here is." I told her Gran had sent me, and she laughed, a small sound, and asked whether Gran still kept the blue jug on the windowsill. I said she did. The mermaid nodded as though that settled a debt, and let a single strand of hair drift down and wrap around my wrist, cool and light.

When I got home the pail was full of windfalls and my wrist was ringed with a thread of rainbow, too fine to pull off. Gran looked at it for a long time, then said the water would go back up by Michaelmas, and that I should leave an apple on the surface next time. I did, the following week, and watched it bob out over the drowned trees until a pale arm came up through the water, took it, and the ripples ran all the way to the far bank.