Side-by-side before and after of a loose, painterly seahorse tattoo on a forearm, shown as a red outline on the left and a coloured version on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seahorse tattoo before and after on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A two-panel before and after image of a seahorse tattoo on the outer forearm, with the curled tail at the lower end. The left panel shows a sketchy, light red outline with broken, feathered strokes, which looks fresh or early in healing. The right panel shows the same seahorse filled with loose, brush-like colour in blue, pink, yellow and purple, with splashes and drips that extend beyond the outline. The background is plain and dark.

Forearm Seahorse Splash Drip

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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 pond behind Hollin Cross had been dry for three summers, so when the rain finally came you went down with the bucket anyway, because your grandmother had asked for water and the well had sunk below the reach of the rope. The mud at the bottom had cracked into grey plates. Something lay among them, pale and folded like a question mark, and you took it for a dead leaf until it lifted its small head and looked at you with a face like a carved chess piece.

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Nobody in Hollin Cross had ever seen a seahorse. The schoolmaster kept a picture of one in a book about the coast, forty miles off, where the sea was supposed to be. You carried the creature home with the water slopping over the rim, and set it in the enamel basin on the dresser where the lamplight fell. By morning its colours had come up through its skin: blue along the spine, a wash of pink at the throat, a yellow flare where the light touched it. Where the paint ran, it ran off the basin onto the table and down the legs in long bright threads.

Your grandmother said the old sea had once lain under the whole forest, before the trees were planted and the sea went away to the coast to sulk. She said it with her back to you, scrubbing the table. That night the seahorse rattled its tail against the basin and pulled toward the window, and the colour came off it in splashes that dried on the sill like paint on a palette.

In the morning you carried it back to the pond, and the rain had filled it to the brim. You tipped the basin gently and watched it drop into the brown water, flaring blue and gold as it went. When the schoolmaster came up the path later, he found only rings of colour drying on the stones, and a single streak of violet running down the bank toward the trees.