Mermaid coloring page

A mermaid seen from behind with a long scaled tail curling to a wide fin, free to print on US Letter.

Start at the bottom of this one. The tail is the biggest shape on the sheet: it leaves the waist, curls around in a long arc, and ends in a wide fin split into two flukes. The scales are drawn as overlapping rows that get smaller as the tail narrows toward the fin. Above the waist the mermaid is turned away, with hair falling almost the whole length of her back in long loose ribbons. No face is drawn from this angle, so the page is really two big fills, hair and tail, with the scale rows as the only fine work.

Scales are the part that decides how long this page takes. Filling every scale on its own with a fine pencil is a long absorbing job and gives the best result. Filling whole rows in one pass and then darkening only the lower curve of each scale is much quicker and still reads as scales from arm's length. There is also the option of ignoring them and laying one flat color over the entire tail, which turns the scale lines into a faint pattern under the color rather than the subject of it.

Tails invite a color change along their length, since the shape is long enough to carry one. Green at the waist easing into blue at the flukes, or a deep teal that lightens as it goes, both work with the way the rows shrink. Press lightly at the start if you plan that, because a gradient built from light layers can be pushed darker later while a heavy first pass cannot be lightened. Real fish carry blues, greens, silvers and browns, and a tail in hot pink or plain orange is nobody's mistake.

Watercolor pencil is worth trying here even if you have never used it: color the tail dry, then touch a barely damp brush to the scales and the pencil marks soften into a wash while the black outline stays put. Ordinary colored pencil layers well over an area this size. Markers are fast and vivid but will show every stop and start as a streak across the wide fin, so move in one direction and keep the tip moving. Whatever you use, the fin at the very end has thin ribs that reward a lighter hand than the body of the tail.

The hair runs from the top of the head down to somewhere near the tail, which makes it the second largest area and the one most likely to fight with the first. If the tail is going dark, a pale gold or copper keeps the two apart. If the tail is going pale, dark hair gives the sheet a spine. The strands are drawn as wide curving bands, so filling along the curve rather than across it keeps the flow, and leaving one band lighter than its neighbors reads as light catching the top of a wave.

The tail on this sheet ends in a broad fin held out flat, closer to the flukes of a whale than to the upright tail fin of a fish. That is how this one is drawn, and it is worth noticing while you color, because the flat fin gives you a wide unbroken area that shows whatever you do to it. The scales overlapping in rows, each one tucked partly under the one above, is borrowed from real fish, where the rows lie the way roof tiles lie.

Print at actual size on plain letter paper, since scaling to fit shrinks the scale rows first and they are already the smallest shapes on the page. Card stock is the better choice for markers, both because the tail is a lot of ink in one place and because a thin sheet dampened by a watercolor pencil can buckle under the wash. If two people are coloring, print two and compare tails at the end. The layout leaves room around the curl of the tail so no part of the fin runs into the margin.

A finished tail looks good taped to a window, where the light picks out anything you left white in the scales. The sheet also cuts out well: the outline of the figure and tail is one long continuous curve, so it can be trimmed in a single pass and mounted on a colored background sheet. The scale rows repeat one small shape the length of the tail, which makes this a slow sheet to fill and a forgiving one, since a scale colored oddly disappears into the rows around it in a way that a slip on a large plain area never does.

Published August 28, 2026Updated August 28, 2026773 words