Colour tattoo of a giraffe-seahorse hybrid with an orange spotted body, blue eye and pink ear, curled tail and black outline, on a person's side above the hip.

Giraffe seahorse hybrid on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style creature combines a giraffe's head, ossicones and ears with a seahorse's curled body and tail. The orange and brown patches are shaded softly, the eye is blue and the ear is pink, and the whole design is held by a bold black outline. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with the curled tail finishing lower down the body and a navel piercing visible above.

Ribs Giraffe Seahorse Animal Spots Tail Cartoon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry had been parked on the hard shoulder of the B-road for three days, its water tank bone dry, when Ottoline decided she would not wait for rain. She was a seahorse by birth, a proper curled and sensible one, but the salt flats had stretched her neck until she could see over the wire fences and the telegraph poles, and the two little knobs on her head had sprouted like antlers nobody had asked for. Nobody at the lay-by believed a word of it.

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Her tail was still good for gripping. She wound it round the axle of a rusted trailer and hauled herself down the embankment towards the one thing she could smell from the road, which was wet sand. Behind her, a driver called Hamid Pell swore at a puncture and then, because he was kind, shouted that there was a flask of lemon squash in the cab if she wanted it. She did not want squash. She wanted the sea, and she had decided it was a day's walk south.

The road ran on past a pylon, a dead petrol station and a painted sign for a beach that had moved away years ago. Ottoline counted her spots at each mile marker, orange patches fading pale in the heat, and by the fourth marker she had stopped counting and started humming the tide song her grandmother used to sing in the kelp. A goat watched her go by and said nothing. Goats rarely do.

At dusk she reached a salt pan where the light lay flat and silver. The water was a thin rumour, a shine no deeper than a spoon, but she waded in until it covered her tail, then lay down with her neck stretched along the surface like a bridge. Hamid found her there at dawn, back with a spare wheel, and saw that the puddle had grown a little overnight. He drove on without a word about it, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for her in a week.