Black and grey fine line tattoo of a seated mermaid with long wavy hair and a finned tail, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seated mermaid tattoo on a lower leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A seated mermaid faces away from the viewer, with long wavy hair falling over her shoulder and a scaled tail curling below her. The linework is fine and sketch-like, with soft grey shading across the body and tail fins. The design fills the length of the calf against a blurred indoor background.

Fine line Calf Mermaid Tail Hair Fish scale Fin

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

Nobody on the nine-twenty ever looks back at the harbour wall, which is why I notice when someone does. I've worked the ticket hatch at Strand Halt for eleven winters, and the sea is the only thing here that stays put. The trains come in backwards from Exeter with their lamps lit in the daytime, and the platform smells of diesel and brine in equal measure.

Keep reading

Ruth Penhallow came through every Thursday for a year with a battered fibre suitcase that dripped wet sand onto the boards. She never bought a ticket to anywhere. She sat on the far bench, the one with the iron scroll that has lost its paint, and combed her hair with a bone comb while the rain came in sideways off the water. When I asked her once where she was going, she said she was waiting on a train that had been cancelled in 1938, and that somebody ought to tell it.

The Thursday the storm took the signal box roof, she didn't come. Instead there was a parcel on the bench, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with kelp. Inside was a single fin, grey and translucent as a wet gull's wing, and a note in pencil: Tell the 9.20 it can stop now. I stood on the platform until the lamps came on. Then I rang the bell for the last train out, and for the first time in eleven winters the driver lifted a hand from the cab, as if he had seen someone at the far end of the platform, combing her hair against the wind.