Black line drawing of a mermaid with long curling hair and a fish tail, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Mermaid with wavy hair line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a mermaid with her eyes closed, her long hair swirling around her head and shoulders, and her hands resting near her chest. Her fish tail curls down and out at the base of the composition, with fins and wave-like strokes drawn in fine, even lines. The design is shown in black ink on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Mermaid Hair Fish tail Fin Wave Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring had gone east for the third week running, and the Skerrow fleet came back each dusk with nets as light as washing. Old Jessop Rae blamed the moon. His son Tam blamed nothing, because he had seen what came up in the nets on the Tuesday and would not say it aloud on the quay.

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It was a woman from the waist up, tangled in the lines at the foot of the net, with hair that had caught in every mesh. Where her legs should have been there was a tail that curled like a breaking wave, its fins as fine as lace. Tam could have cut her free with the gutting knife. Instead he sat with her in the bilge water while the boat rocked, and she kept her eyes closed as if listening to something far below. She asked for nothing for a long while. Then she said, in a voice like shingle dragged back by the tide, that she wanted the bell from the Skerrow buoy, the one the storm had torn from its chain in the winter.

He fetched the bell that night, rowing out alone with a lantern in the bow. When he lowered it over the side she touched it once with her palm, and the note went down through the black water like a stone dropped into a well. The next morning the nets came up heavy, silver to the rim, and the fleet sang all the way back into harbour.

Tam never saw her again. Every autumn, though, a single long strand of wet hair lay coiled on the bollard by his mooring, and his mother swore it came from no woman in the village. He kept the strand in a biscuit tin. The fish kept coming, and the bell stayed at the bottom of the bay, ringing faintly whenever a storm came up from the south.