Black line drawing of a mermaid with long flowing hair and a sweeping, finned tail curling into spirals, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Mermaid with swirling tail line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a mermaid seen from behind, with her head turned to one side and long hair rising into curling swirls above her. Her tail sweeps down and around her body in tapering fins and spirals, and the lines vary in weight to suggest movement. The design is drawn in black ink on white paper with no shading or colour.

Mermaid Tail Hair Swirl Spiral Fin Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Drowned Gull in on the Tuesday, and by the third evening the regulars had run out of weather to talk about. I was wiping down the bar with a rag that smelled of last summer's cider when the stranger stamped in out of the drift, shaking white from a canvas bag, and asked if I had a pen that would not blot.

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I had a quill, which was the only thing in the house that behaved. She sat by the hearth and took a sheet of my good paper, the kind the harbourmaster used for his tide tables, and began to draw without looking up. She drew the way I have seen men draw knots, slowly at the ends and quick through the middle, so the lines went thick where the water pulled hardest and thin where they wanted to float free. Hair first, lifting in curls above the head like weed on a turning tide. Then a long tail that folded back on itself in fins sharp as a saw blade, spiralling down the page until it ran off the bottom edge.

Mrs Pardoe, who had buried two husbands to the sea, leaned over her shoulder and said that was not how the figurehead had gone, the one that used to hang over the slipway before the storm of 47. The stranger only smiled and kept drawing. When she finished she folded the paper into my hand and said I should put it somewhere the snow could not reach. I pinned it above the bar, and in the morning the thaw had come and the drift outside had a spiral printed in it, a curling trail leading down to the millpond, where the ice was already cracking open along the shape of a tail.