The Starbucks logo is a two-tailed siren from European folklore.

When Starbucks was founded in Seattle in 1971, its designers went looking for a nautical image and settled on a sixteenth-century woodcut of a twin-tailed siren, or melusine. The original logo showed the figure in full, bare-chested and holding both tails.

Successive redesigns cropped in closer and stylised the image, dropping the surrounding text and eventually the “Starbucks Coffee” wordmark altogether, leaving just the green siren.