Black ink line drawing of a mermaid arching backwards with long flowing hair and a curling tail, in a fine line style, shown on a plain white background.

Reclining mermaid line drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single-line drawing of a mermaid leaning back with her head tipped up, one arm stretched out and long hair swirling behind her. Her body and sweeping tail are drawn with thin, continuous black outlines and no shading. The subject sits centrally on a plain white background, with the tail extending down the page.

Fine line Mermaid Tail Long hair Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told since childhood that the bay takes one person every summer, and you have never believed it until the August the Pentland boy fails to come up from the slipway. You are sixteen, your hands smell of tar from your father's nets, and the whole of Skelder Cove is standing along the harbour wall with lanterns they do not need yet, because it is only four in the afternoon.

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Your mother sends you down to the rocks with a grey blanket. Under the lee of the breakwater you find what everyone has been murmuring about: a woman, or something shaped like one, lying back across the wet shelf with her head tipped to the sky as if the sun were a hymn she had half forgotten. Her hair runs out behind her in one long rope and curls at the end like a fern uncoiling. One arm reaches toward the water. Her tail trails down into the surf, long and sweeping, so thin in places that you can see the light through it.

She is not holding anyone. The boy is in the shallows, coughing and furious, with a gash on his shin from the mussel bed. She looks at you, then at the coil of net you have dragged down with you, and you understand she has been caught in it since morning. You cut her free with your father's knife, quickly, and she does not thank you. She slides backward off the shelf, and her tail lifts once like a question mark before it goes under.

Next morning the boy swears there was nothing on the rocks but weed. Your father hangs the net to dry on the fence and says nothing at all. You still walk down to the breakwater every evening with the blanket over your arm, and on the fourth day you find a single curl of pale hair pinned to the stone with a limpet shell, its point turned out towards the sea.