Black and grey fine line tattoo of a faceless skeletal mermaid with long flowing hair and a crescent moon, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton mermaid on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A faceless skeletal mermaid with long, wavy hair and a fishbone-style tail is drawn vertically down the leg, with the ribs and spine picked out in fine linework. Thin dotted circles and a crescent moon sit around the figure, and the hair and tail use darker shading against the lighter bones. The design is entirely in black ink and greys and is centred along the length of the calf.

Fine line Dotwork Calf Mermaid Skeleton Hair Moon Tail Dotted circle Spine Ribs

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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

Dearest Tom, the snow has been against the shutters since Tuesday and the carrier has not come up from Alston, so I am writing by the last of the tallow at the corner table, where the draught is least. You will forgive the smudges. The fire has been fed on the settle and on two chairs I shall not mention to Mrs Gilling.

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The gentleman in the back room, the one who measures things, left a drawing on the mantel before he walked out to the millpond on Monday. It is a woman in fine black lines, long hair lifting like weed, her ribs and spine showing through as though the gulls have picked her clean. Her tail is a fishbone fan. Above her hangs a crescent moon, and round the whole there are small dotted circles, like the rings a stone makes on still water. He said his mother's sailmaker drew such figures on the ribs of boats so the drowned would know the way home. He did not say how he had come by that notion.

He has not come back. The millpond ice cracked on Tuesday night with a sound like a door shutting in another house, and this morning there was only a line of boot prints across the frost, stopping at the black edge of the water. Mrs Gilling says he was always going to go in one winter or another. I have pinned his drawing above the hearth where the heat can reach it.

Each night I look up and the moon in it seems a shade fuller, and the dotted rings sit closer together than they did. The carrier is due at noon if the road allows. Come up with him when you can, and bring your brass rule. I want you to measure the distance between the ice and the lowest rib, and tell me whether it is shrinking. Your loving sister, Agnes.