Colour tattoo of a purple seahorse with a green eye and orange starfish over blue water streaks, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple seahorse with starfish on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A purple seahorse with a green eye and a curled tail is the central subject, with white highlights and shaded ridges along its body. Orange starfish sit at three points around it, and turquoise streaks sweep up behind it to suggest moving water. Colour dominates the piece, and the dark background frames the skin tone against the design.

Neo-trad Forearm Seahorse Starfish Water Sea creature

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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 rain had been coming sideways off Penhallow Quay since seven, and by eleven the only stall still open was Mr Tregear's, where he sold cockles from a bucket and tried not to look at the sky. He set a biscuit tin on my trestle and taped its lid down twice. "Don't open it in the wet," he said. "Keep it dry till you get it home."

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I didn't open it until the market had emptied and the gulls had given up on the bins. Inside, folded in a tea towel, was a driftwood seahorse painted the purple of a bruised plum, its ridges picked out in white, its eye a clear sea-green that caught the lamplight. Someone had brushed blue streaks behind it like current, and four orange starfish had been set around its tail with a careful hand. Tucked under the towel was a card in a looping hand: For the wall where the sun lands first. Love, M.

Mr Tregear's wife had painted it, he told me the next morning, the summer before their boy went out on the trawlers. Every March since, she had touched up the faded parts, and now that her hands had stiffened he wanted it to go somewhere it would be looked after. He would not take money for it. He asked only that I tell the buyer which way the tail curls, so they know it is meant to swim up.

A month later a woman in a yellow mac came into the shop asking about garden ornaments. She stood in front of the seahorse for a long time, then asked me to wrap it for the south wall of her sister's house in Newlyn. "It looks like it's coming up out of the water," she said. I did not tell her the rain had stopped by then, or that the sun was only beginning to find that wall.