Black and grey pencil sketch of a mermaid with her arms raised above her head, long flowing hair and a scaled fish tail, shown as a tattoo design.

Mermaid with raised arms pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid faces right with both arms raised above her head, wearing a small tiara, with long wavy hair streaming behind her. Her fish tail curls down and out, with scales drawn along the upper section and long, feathered fins at the base. The work uses soft pencil shading and fine hatched lines on a pale background, and it is entirely in greys and black.

Mermaid Hair Fish tail Scale Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had been out a full day when the fishermen of Lessary Reach found the tiara on the mudflats, a silver ring no bigger than a bramble wreath, and nobody would lift it until Mother Orla came down with her gloves on. She turned it over twice, said it was pewter and not silver, and told them the sea did not lose things by accident.

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The old tale of the Reach said the sea-queen Ysolde had once danced on the rocks with her arms lifted to the moon, her hair flying out over the water like smoke off a snuffed lamp, and that she wore a crown to show the land she was still owed a king. Her scales were darker along the spine and paler at the edge, and her fins fanned out like the hem of a torn skirt, feathered where they touched the brine.

The king of Lessary Reach, a man called Corin Dace who had never once tasted salt he had not bought, sent his tax men down to the shore that spring. They counted nets, boats and children, and when they reached the cove where the queen had danced they found a crowd of women standing in the shallows with their arms raised, singing to the water. Corin ordered them away. The women did not move, so he went down himself with a lantern and a sword.

He found the water no deeper than his ankles, and nothing in it but a silver crown turning slowly over the sand. When he bent to pick it up, a hand came out of the surf and closed on his wrist, cool and patient as the tide. Mother Orla said afterwards that the sea had only wanted to return what it had borrowed. Corin walked home in the dawn with wet boots, and the next year the Reach paid its tithe in fish.