Black tribal-style mermaid design with flowing swirled hair and a curling fishtail, drawn in solid black on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal mermaid flash design

Black and grey · Flash

A mermaid with long, flowing hair and her eyes closed, drawn as a bold black silhouette. The body and tail are filled with curved tribal-style patterns and swirls, with the hair forming large looping curls above her. The figure is centred on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Mermaid Hair Tail Swirl Woman

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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

Four bells and the copper is still green at the rivets, so you scour it again while Hobday swears at the bread. The porthole is black and the sea slaps the hull close enough to hear through the bulkhead. Every morning there is weed in the galley drain, long black strands of it, and every morning it has been knotted: loops inside loops, a curl tucked back on itself like the hair on the figurehead above the bowsprit.

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Hobday says it is the sea putting its hands in the kitchen. You say nothing, because you have seen the figurehead's paint going grey, and because you saw her hair lift the night before in a wind that was not blowing.

So at the middle watch you climb onto the forecastle with a tin of pitch and a stiff brush. She is carved with her eyes shut, a woman bent over her own tail, every scale cut in as a black swirl that thirty years of weather has been eating. You work the brush along the curve of her waist while the bow lifts and drops, and the spray comes over the rail in cold sheets that taste of iron.

By the time the bell goes for eight you are soaked and your hands are black to the wrist. In the galley the drain runs clear and Hobday is singing something off-key over the stove. Then you find, pinned under the edge of your bread board, a single curl of weed knotted into a tight, perfect spiral, still dripping, and you slip it into your pocket without telling him.