Colour tattoo of a purple and teal seahorse with a curled tail and pink cheek, shown on the thigh in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple and teal seahorse tattoo

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A seahorse with a curled tail and a small pink-tinted cheek is shown in profile against bare skin. The body is segmented with dark outlines and highlighted ridges, and its fin and head are shaded from violet to turquoise. The design sits centrally on a close crop of a limb, with the tail curling at the base.

Neo-trad Thigh Seahorse Sea creature Fish Fin Curl

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

Every spring the boats from Skarra came back with their nets empty, and old Maren Holt said it was because the sea had lost its temper over a debt. Nobody on the island remembered who had made the debt. They only remembered that the seahorse had been seen off the north slip, curled round a mooring chain like a watch spring, and that nobody had been allowed to lift it.

Keep reading

Her grandson Tam went down anyway, at low water, with a jar and a bad knee. The rock pools were warm that year. He found the creature wedged in the weed, its bony plates catching the light in bands of violet that turned to green at the belly, its tail wound tight as a fist. It did not swim off. It looked at him sideways, the way a neighbour does before deciding whether to lend a cup of meal.

"You owe us nothing," Tam told it, because his gran had taught him to be polite to things that could drown a town. "I only want the nets to come home."

The seahorse uncurled one turn of its tail, slowly, and pointed its snout at the grey water past the breakwater. Tam understood. He carried it out on his palm to the deep channel, where the current ran hard, and set it down facing the open sea.

The nets came up heavy the next morning. Maren said nothing about it, but she put a dab of rose madder on her own cheek for the first time in years, and wore it until Sunday.