Black and grey realism style tattoo of a seahorse and a starfish on the inner ankle and lower leg of a bare leg against a white background.

Seahorse and starfish on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded black and grey seahorse with a curled tail sits on the lower leg, with a starfish below it near the ankle. The seahorse has fine linework and soft grey shading across its segmented body and fins, giving it a dimensional look. The leg is photographed against a plain white background, with the foot raised and the tattoo centred in the frame.

Realism Ankle Seahorse Starfish Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The summer I was eleven, Dad sold the last of the dried seahorses from the jar behind the bait counter to a man from Bristol who wanted them for a glass case. Mum said we'd never see them again and she was right, but Dad kept the empty jar on the windowsill anyway, the way he kept last year's tide tables pinned to the back door long after the calendar had turned.

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Nobody in Saltcombe had ever seen a seahorse alive except Mr Pruett, who dragged the harbour wall every Tuesday with a shrimp net and a bad temper. He said the father carried the young in a pouch, which Dad called rubbish until Mr Pruett produced one from his coat, grey and curled as an old thimble, its tail wound tight round his little finger. "Look at the tail," he said. "Never quite still, even when it's gone."

The starfish came in on the same spring tide, a small one with a chipped arm. I set it in the bottom of the jar with a handful of sand, and by the end of the month the broken arm had grown back, pale as a fingernail. Mum swore it was the seawater. Dad only shrugged and said some things were built to start again from a piece of themselves.

When I left for the hospital in Poole, Dad wrapped the jar in the Echo and pressed it into my hands with the lid still on. It's empty now, but I keep it on my own sill, and every April I catch myself checking the sand for a tail that has moved.