Pencil line drawing of a mermaid with both arms raised, flowing hair and a scaled tail, shown as a tattoo design sketch on paper with no body placement.

Mermaid with raised arms, pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a mermaid with both arms raised above her head, long wavy hair drifting around her, and a scaled tail curling into flowing water at the base. The linework is fine and even, with the scales rendered as overlapping arcs and the hair as sweeping curves. The image is monochrome pencil on pale paper, with faint construction lines visible and a few small reddish marks on the chest.

Mermaid Scale Tail Hair Wave Sketch

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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 rain has been coming sideways across Ferrin Quay since six, and by eleven you have given up on the awning. You stand at the back of your father's stall with a pencil drawing pinned to the tarpaulin: a woman with both arms raised as if to catch something falling, her hair spilling out into the wind like weed on a turning tide. Nobody has stopped to look at her. The fishmongers shout over the drip, and the gulls have gone quiet in the lee of the bins.

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A boy from the crab boats ducks under the edge and asks what the lady is for. You tell him she is unfinished. Her tail still ends in a rough hook of construction lines, and the water around her is only a suggestion. He laughs and says the sea doesn't finish anything, it just goes on, and you find yourself agreeing, though you are not sure you believe him. Your grandmother used to say the first woman in the harbour walked up the slipway on a night like this, shaking seawater out of her hair, and asked the nearest man for a knife to cut her own name into the wood of the quay.

After he leaves you take the pencil from behind your ear. The rain has found the tarpaulin's low corner and is running off it in a single bright line, and you watch it bend and fork and drift. You draw until your fingers are grey: a last curl at the end of the tail, a loose strand of hair lifting past the drawing's edge, a ripple that goes on past the paper.

When the lights come on along the quay, the sheet is wet at one corner and the woman's hair has grown a little further into the margin. Beside her, on the blank paper, a small ink-dark smudge has dried where your thumb rested, and it looks, in this poor light, like a second hand reaching up to meet hers.