Teal line drawing of a mermaid with scale details and a tapering tail on a white background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teal mermaid line drawing

Colour · Flash

A single figure of a mermaid is drawn in teal outline, with a head turned slightly to one side, a curved torso and a tail that splits into two fins at the bottom. The linework varies in thickness, with thicker strokes along the body and tail and finer strokes for the small scale shapes on the shoulders, side and waist. The design is rendered in one colour on a plain white background with the figure centred and open at the edges.

Mermaid Scale Tail Fin Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Marine Ballroom had stopped for the interval, and Nell was still counting coats when the girl came up the cloakroom stairs with seawater running off her hair. She didn't ask for a ticket. She asked for a towel and the name of the tune they had been playing, and when Nell told her it was "Moonlight on the Solent", the girl laughed as if the joke had been on her for years.

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Nobody on the pier had ever seen her dance, but by the second waltz the whole floor had cleared. She moved with her head turned a little to one side, as though listening for something under the boards. Where her feet should have been there was only the quick flicker of a fin beneath her skirt, and when the sequins caught the lamplight they threw back a colour like the sea off Bournemouth in July.

Nell's father had worked the pilings for forty years, mending the rot and listening to the tide knock against the timber. He had told her that the sea kept its own dancers and that the pier was only a stage they were allowed to borrow. She thought of that now while the girl turned, scales catching silver at her shoulders, and she understood why the bandleader kept looking at the floor instead of his music.

At midnight the lights were dimmed for the last waltz. When Nell went to lock the cloakroom, she found the towel folded neatly on the bench, damp and smelling of salt, and beneath it a single teal scale no bigger than a fingernail. She held it to the lamp. Below the boards something rolled over and the whole pier hummed like a plucked string, and she went home without locking the door.