Pencil sketch of a mermaid woman with octopus tentacles, starfish and a shell bodice, drawn as a tattoo design rather than shown on skin.

Mermaid with octopus tentacles sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with mermaid-like features, her hair replaced by curling octopus tentacles and starfish. Her face is shown in three-quarter view, and a shell covers her chest, with a tentacle wrapping down past her shoulder. The shading is light grey graphite with fine hatching and soft tonal areas on the skin and sea creatures, with no colour.

Mermaid Woman Octopus Tentacle Starfish Shell Sea creature

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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 sketchbook came up in the mesh of the trawl with a dead conger coiled round it, and Maud Penhallow wiped the slime from its cover on her oilskin before she would touch it. The paper had swollen and the pages stuck, but the pencil held. Graphite, soft and grey, a woman's face turned three-quarters to the viewer, her hair replaced by curling arms that wound over her brow and down past her shoulder. Starfish sat in the tangle like brooches. A scallop shell covered her chest, its ridges shaded so finely that Maud could almost feel them under her thumb.

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Under the last drawing someone had written in careful copperplate: She does not mind being drawn. She minds being kept. The hand was old, and the ink had gone the colour of weak tea. Maud's father had sailed the Gannet Mary for thirty years and never once mentioned a sketchbook, but he had always said the sea kept its own accounts and sooner or later sent a receipt. The crew muttered that the book was bad luck. Ruari, the mate, wanted it put back over the side before the tide turned.

So at slack water Maud rowed the dinghy out past the breakwater alone. She had found a name in the harbour ledger, a surveyor called Ansel Dracott who had drawn charts for the Skerrow fishing company and vanished off a Lerwick ferry in the winter of 1891. She had no plan beyond that. She opened the book on the gunwale and let the wind turn the pages.

The last drawing was unfinished. The shell was open, and a single tentacle ran from it towards the edge of the paper, where the pencil had faded into blank cream. Maud set the book on the black water. It drifted, then sank slowly, and for a moment the line of that last curl showed grey beneath the surface before the cold took it.