Coloured pencil tattoo design of a mermaid wearing a rose crown, drawn in a neo-traditional style with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with rose crown and ship design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A drawn tattoo design of a woman with a mermaid tail, wearing a crown of large roses and a patterned headband. Her necklace has a red pendant, and a small sailing ship sits at the lower edge beside a splash of water. The bold black outlines are filled with blue, pink, peach and green coloured pencil on a plain cream background.

Neo-trad Traditional Mermaid Woman Rose Flower crown Ship Necklace Pendant Fish tail Water Headband

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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

You find the bottle in the shallows below the north rocks on the morning the fog lifts, its cork swollen and the paper inside gone soft as bread. Your grandfather would have thrown it back. Instead you carry it up the hundred and twelve steps of Scarrow Point light and set it on the lamp room sill, where the brass still holds the early sun.

Keep reading

The letter is in pencil, the hand careful and slanted, and it is addressed to the keeper of the light. It asks him to remember a crown of roses left on the ledge the winter the ship went down, and a red stone on a chain that was never returned. Someone has signed it only with the letter M and a fish tail curling round the margin, drawn with more patience than skill.

You read it twice, then a third time in the good light. The writer waited every night for the beam to swing across the water, because the light was the only thing that ever told them where the rocks were. Now the lamp is electric, the keeper's cottage stands empty, and the sea keeps handing back things nobody asked for.

That evening you climb again with the bottle wrapped in oilskin. At the rail you lower it into the swell, and the beam passes over you, over the water, and over a ship's shape the tide has drawn in the foam, which has not yet broken apart. You watch until the light turns and the water goes dark, then you come down the steps with your hands empty.