Black linework flash design of an ornate seahorse built from curling swirls and solid circles on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate seahorse design in black swirls

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised seahorse drawn in black on a white background, with its body formed from long curling lines and tapering scrolls. Solid black circles and small spirals sit along the body and tail, and fine lines suggest ornamental filigree. The composition is a single tall figure centred on the page with open white space around it.

Seahorse Swirl Spiral Bubble Ornament

Find an artist for this

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

The clockmaker's widow in Saltmarsh Fair kept a seahorse in a jar of brine on her stall, and nobody at the fair could say where she had got it. It was no bigger than a thimble, and it curled itself round a sprig of samphire all day, uncurling only when the lamps were lit. Children paid a penny to look at it through the glass, and the widow let them, because she was not a cruel woman, only a tired one.

Keep reading

In the third week of the fair a boy called Tobias Rook came with a sack of rabbit skins to sell, and he stopped at the jar and watched the little creature unwind itself slowly, the way a fern opens. He was a boy who did not believe in much, but he saw the seahorse lift its head and blow three bubbles against the glass, each one perfectly round, and each one bursting with a sound like a distant bell. He asked what they were for. The widow said they were for asking questions, and that the seahorse would answer one for every bubble, but only if the question was true.

Tobias had only one question, and he had carried it since his mother went into the sea at Gull Point. He did not ask it. He thought about it so hard that the third bubble wobbled and hung in the brine, and the seahorse looked at him with eyes like pinheads of jet. Then it turned, slow as a scroll being rolled, and wound itself down the glass, past the samphire, into the dark at the bottom of the jar.

The widow shrugged and closed the lid. But that night the tide came up the marsh road higher than anyone had seen it, and Tobias, walking home on the dyke, found his mother's shawl caught on a post, dry as a bone, with a single black bubble stuck to its fringe.