Two photographs of forearm tattoos: a blue bird among green leaves on the left, and an orange seahorse with a blue wash and dotted bubbles near the elbow on the right.

Bird and seahorse tattoos on forearms

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The left photograph shows a blue bird perched among green leaf or flower shapes on a forearm, with faint blue marks along the edge of the arm. The right photograph shows an orange seahorse with a black outline and a loose blue watercolour-style wash, with small dotted bubbles rising above it near the elbow. Both tattoos use bold, flat colour with simple, hand-drawn linework and open composition.

Forearm Bird Leaves Flower Seahorse Bubble Watercolour wash

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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

Nobody in Shingle Cove had seen the seahorse Dora kept in the sink, not until the August the tide went out further than anyone could remember and left the harbour wall standing in mud. Her father had kept a glass jar of sea water on the windowsill for forty years, and when he died she inherited the jar, the sill and a seahorse no longer than her thumb called Pike, who did not care for mud.

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She tipped the jar into the basin on the first morning of the low tide and watched the water turn blue, the way it always had when her father stirred in tins of watercolour to make the sea look kinder than it was. Pike uncurled in the wash, orange as a marmalade peel, and blew three small bubbles at the ceiling, as if he had strong views about the plumbing.

The sea came back at four in the afternoon, the way it does. Dora walked a teacup down the slipway with her palm cupped over the rim. Mr Hendry from the lifeboat shed asked what she was carrying. "Something that needs more room than I've got," she said, and tipped him out over the weed. He sank a little, considered his situation, then drifted under the wall with his tail hooked on nothing at all.

That night she scrubbed the basin and found a blue smudge on the enamel that would not come off, and she left it there.