Black line drawing of a mermaid with flowing, swirling hair and an ornamental scrolled tail on a white background, suitable as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaid with swirling hair and tail

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid is drawn in black outline, with long hair flowing into curling scrolls and her arms extended to the sides. Her body and tail are filled with decorative swirls and wave-like patterns, and the lower tail fin curls outward. The drawing is monochrome on a plain white background and fills the frame vertically.

Mermaid Hair Tail Swirl Wave Scroll

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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 sea had come up the lower field in the night, which it had never done in my father's time, and by first light I was knee-deep in it with a lantern and a bucket, swearing at the gate that would not latch. The water was black and full of wrack. Frost stiffened the reeds along the drain, and every breath I let out hung in front of me like something I would have to answer for.

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She was caught in the hawthorn where the drain bends. At first I took her for a drift of weed, then for a coat, then I saw the hair, long and dark and heavy with water, curling off the branches in scrolls as neat as a blacksmith's ironwork. Her tail was wedged between two stones, its fin spread wide and stiff with ice. She looked at me the way the ewes look at a dog they have decided not to fear.

"You've let the tide onto my side," she said. I told her the tide had let itself in, and she laughed, which was not a sound I expected from anything with gills. She wanted the sluice opened so the water could go back past the wall. I put my shoulder to the winch until my palms bled through my gloves, and she guided the flood with a single flick of that great tail, folding the wrack into little waves as it drained away past the posts.

When the field was grey mud again she was gone, and the hawthorn was hung with a comb of pale shell, which I still keep on the windowsill. In April the lambs came early and clean, and every morning I checked the lower drain for her before I checked the ewes.