Teal fine line drawing of a mermaid with flowing wavy hair and a scaled fish tail curling below, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal line drawing of a mermaid

Fine line · Colour · Flash

The image shows a mermaid drawn in continuous teal outlines, with long wavy hair flowing above her head and a scaled fish tail curling beneath her. The linework is fine and even, with scale patterns and hair strands suggested by repeated curves rather than shading. The single teal colour sits on a plain white background, and the figure fills most of the frame.

Fine line Mermaid Hair Fish tail Scale Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric to Prior Aldhelm, Saint Brannoc's Priory, on the feast of Saint Swithin.

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Reverend Father, I write before the tide turns, because the carter who brings the salt will not wait and neither, I fear, will my courage. Down at the cove below the mill, Tobiah the eel-man swears he saw a woman lying on the rocks with her hair spread over the water like wrack, and a tail that rose and fell with the swell.

I went down with him at first light. There was nothing on the shingle but weed and one gull picking at a crab shell. Yet in the wet sand the tail had left its mark, scales pressed in a pattern I could only copy as rows of small curling arcs, the same arcs I have been drawing in the margins of the Psalter these last weeks. I enclose a sheet of it. Forgive the smudge; the ink froze on my fingers.

Brother Anselm says the sea women are devils who sing sailors onto the reef. Tobiah says she did not sing. She combed her hair with her fingers and looked at him the way a woman looks at a neighbour across a hedge, then slid back under the foam and left a tangle of curls caught on the rock. I have kept one strand. It is the colour of the sea in August, which is to say no colour I have a name for, and I cannot tell you what it weighs.

I am sending the strand with this letter, wrapped in linen, so you may judge for yourself. If you find it heavy, Father, pray for me. If it is light, I will ask Tobiah to take me down again at the next low tide.