Black line drawing of a mermaid wrapped around an anchor with a rope, in a traditional flash style, on a sheet of paper.

Mermaid wrapped around an anchor flash

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing on white paper shows a mermaid with a flowing tail coiled around an anchor, with a rope wrapping the shaft and curling to the right. Parts of other designs are visible at the edges, including a dragon, a rose and a square and compass. The linework is bold and even with minimal shading, and the drawing is uncoloured.

Traditional Anchor Mermaid Rope Dragon Rose

Find an artist for this

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 hawser had slackened with the tide, and Ada Pell stood knee-deep in the harbour slime, heaving at the shank of an anchor she had been told for twenty years was lost. Gulls screamed over the fish market behind her. Her brother Jem watched from the bottom step with his cap pushed back, not helping.

Keep reading

Weed had grown thick over the iron, but the rope was still there, tarred manila gone grey, wound twice around the stock and knotted in a crown her father used to tie. Where the rope lay against the shaft, the iron had been worked into a woman. Her hair was drawn back in a plait, one arm hooked round the stock, and her tail swept down past the flukes in scales that caught the low sun. Ada had seen that tail on the Dorothy Vane's bow when she was six, before the ship went out and never came back.

'Leave it,' Jem said. 'Mam made me promise we'd not go hunting for it.'

'Mam was wrong about most things, and right about the rest.' Ada took the knot in both hands. It had not been untied since the spring the Vane was posted missing, and it came loose the way old things do, all at once and without fuss.

The anchor shifted, settled, and the mermaid rolled on her side in the shallows, face to the sky. Ada let the rope run through her fingers and watched the tide close over the carved plait. Jem came down the steps at last and stood beside her, and neither of them said that it was no longer theirs to keep.