Cream line drawing of a seahorse filled with ornate doodle-style patterns on a plain olive green background.

Patterned seahorse line drawing

Colour · Flash

A seahorse is drawn in cream linework on a flat olive green background, with its body curling down to a spiral tail. The body is filled with scalloped shapes, scrolls, stripes and small dotted motifs, giving a decorative, zentangle-like texture. The subject is centred and fills most of the tall portrait frame, with no shading and only two colours.

Seahorse Pattern Spiral Sea creature

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 net is already across your knees when Mr Pascoe comes up the slip shouting about the mackerel, and you keep your needle moving, because a knot left loose is a fish lost, and in a town where the chapel roof still leaks every fish is someone's Sunday dinner.

Keep reading

Your pattern book lives in the pocket of your apron, a ledger gone soft at the corners. In its margins you draw what the boats bring in: scallop shells, scrolls like the ends of a fiddle, rows of dots for the mesh. Last Tuesday a seahorse came up tangled in the cod end, dried stiff and cream against the olive weed, and you carried it home in your cardigan and drew it again and again until the curl of its tail looked like something you could sew.

Mrs Tregear says it is bad luck to net a seahorse, that the sea keeps its own. Her son laughs and calls her a superstitious old gull. You say nothing. You have a spool of thread the colour of old candle wax and a float-line that needs marking, so the men can tell whose buoys are whose in a fog thick enough to swallow the lighthouse.

So you work the seahorse into the line, one loop at a time, the body scalloped and striped, the tail wound tight where the cork floats bob. When the boats go out at dawn, the first light finds it on every float, a small pale spiral rocking on green water. Nobody mentions it. Nobody needs to. The sea has kept one, and you have made sure it can find its way home.