Black line drawing of a symmetrical design with two mermaids, two seahorses, an octopus and leaves, shown as a tattoo flash style illustration.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaids, seahorses and octopus design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical black line drawing shows two mermaids with flowing hair and fish tails, flanking two seahorses at the top and an octopus with curling tentacles at the centre. Sprigs of leaves frame the figures on both sides, and wave-like swirls sit at the base. The design uses clean outlines and fine hatching with no shading or colour, and it fills a rounded composition.

Mermaid Seahorse Octopus Leaves Sea Wave

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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-gate sighs before dawn, and you are already on the cold stair with the chart rolled under your arm, its brass rings knocking your ribs at every step. Nobody at Lower Tallow has seen the original in forty years. It lives in a glass drum behind the pump-hall, flaking at the edges: two mermaids facing one another across a central octopus whose arms curl down into a bed of wave-lines. Your task is to copy it onto fresh film before the old ink turns to dust, and the senior keeper, Oma Pell, has made clear that one misplaced hatch will drown a ward.

Keep reading

The mirror is the first thing you learn to respect. Every line on the left answers a line on the right, the seahorses matched like two thoughts that agree, and the fine hatching on the fish-tails is not decoration. You spend three days at the light table with a nib no thicker than a hair, and on the fourth you lay your tracing over the water-glass and the pattern moves. Each tentacle lines up with a valve. Each band of stripes on the seahorses is a depth reading, one line for every fathom, and the leaves framing the mermaids are tide tables written in a language nobody has spoken since the flood.

In the margin of the old drum, scratched so small you need a lens, someone has written: count the lines, not the leaves. You count. The octopus is not the danger at the centre of the design but the reservoir that keeps the gate honest, and the mermaids hold the sea's pressure apart with their open arms. Your copy will be the only chart left that tells the truth.

You finish after midnight. The gate exhales, a long low note that rattles the film in its frame, and you wait for the water to settle. Then you pick up the nib once more and draw a single small leaf in the corner of your margin, where no one will look, so that whoever copies you next will know a hand was here.