A flash drawing of a colourful seahorse with a curled tail, inked outlines, dotwork detail and watercolour-style blue, green, yellow and lilac shading on a white background.

Colourful seahorse design

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A seahorse faces left with a curled tail that spirals at the base, and its fin and body are outlined in black ink. The body is shaded in blue, green, yellow and lilac washes, with dark dotwork speckles along the plates and a detailed eye. The design is shown alone on a plain white background.

Dotwork Seahorse Sea creature Tail Fin Spine Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ballroom at Gullhaven Pier smelled of salt and floor polish, and the band never once played in time with the sea. Ada Fenwick had danced there every Saturday since she was seventeen, and she knew its boards the way a fisherman knows his rope: the sprung one by the doors, the loose nail near the bandstand that caught at every hem.

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Teddy Marr came over from Hastings the summer the new sign went up. He had a tin of watercolours from the hardware shop and no real money, so the committee let him paint the ticket board in return for free lemonade. What he made was a seahorse nearly as tall as Ada, facing the sea with its snout lifted as if it had heard its name. He gave it blue plates that shaded into lilac, green that turned yellow where the light caught it, and a tail wound tight at the base like a watch spring. Every week he added another speck of dark ink along the spines, and every week she told him it was finished.

In October the council letter came. The pier was to be shored up or shut, and the board would go to the skip with the rest. Teddy didn't argue. On the last Saturday he took her hand, and the band, for once, found the beat, a slow waltz that wobbled over the sprung board and the loose nail alike. They went round twice before she noticed he was crying, or pretending the spray had got in his eyes.

Afterwards she went out onto the boards in the dark and found the seahorse still there, the paint cold and tacky under her thumb. She tore a ticket stub from her coat, the date still legible, and tucked it under the curl of the tail where the tide would never reach. Whoever took the board down would have to find it first. She liked to think they would stop and smile.