Symmetrical blue line drawing on cream paper of two mermaids with seahorses, seaweed and a central octopus, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mermaids, seahorses and octopus in blue line art

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical line drawing shows two mermaids facing each other with flowing, wave-like hair and seahorses beside them. Strands of seaweed frame the outer edges, and a large octopus with curling tentacles sits at the centre beneath the mermaids' tails. The fine, even blue linework is drawn on a plain cream background with no shading.

Mermaid Seahorse Octopus Seaweed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the sawdust won't bite. You've all seen the painted board at the front of Quill's Wonder Tent, the two sisters with hair going up like surf, and the rest of you have been wondering why the octopus is squatting between their tails like a bishop at a christening. Well. I'll tell you what old Harriet Tallow told me the night before she sold the tent to a man from Hull.

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Their names were Marrin and Esk, fishermen's daughters from Scarrow Bay, the kind who could hold their breath for a count of two hundred and still sing the chorus of 'Heave Away' after. They fell out over a seahorse. A grey one, no bigger than a thimble, that Esk kept in a jam jar on the windowsill. Marrin let it go off the harbour wall one February, and Esk never spoke to her again, not even when the boats came home short.

Years went by. The sea took their father, and the two girls grew tails where their legs had been, as girls do in that bay if they stare at the water long enough. They swam out on opposite sides of the rocks and never met. But every spring Grandmother Ink, the old octopus who lived under the slipway, came up to the shallows with her eight arms full of wrack and tried to tie them together, and every spring they cut the weed loose with a knife.

Here's the turn, and then I'll take your money. One autumn the octopus wrapped her arms around that jam jar, the one Esk had flung into the surf, and rolled it back to the rocks where both sisters could see it. Inside was no seahorse, only a folded note in Marrin's hand that said SORRY in capital letters. Now the sisters sit either side of Grandmother Ink, tail to tail, and the tide has stopped trying to part them. Two pence for the lantern show, ladies, and mind the step.