Fine line seahorse tattoo in brown ink on the inner forearm of a person wearing denim shorts, with a small solid black spiral tattoo on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seahorse tattoo on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small seahorse with a curled tail is tattooed on the inner forearm, drawn in fine brown-black linework with shaded and stippled detail along the body and fin. A second, solid black spiral resembling a nautilus shell sits on the back of the hand at the left edge of the frame. The photograph is taken against a plain dark background, with the forearm centred and the denim of the shorts filling the right side.

Fine line Forearm Hand Seahorse Spiral Shell Tail Fin

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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 hall smells of floor polish and the same squash that was served in 1998. You stand by the trophy cabinet holding a plastic cup, and across the room Dilys Okonedo is waving at you with a napkin. Nobody has mentioned the harbour yet, and you have decided you will wait until someone does.

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Years ago, in Miss Carrow's art room above the boats, you and Tamsin Reeve drew sea creatures on the backs of old registers. Tamsin could do the stippling, hundreds of tiny dots that made a fin look like frost on a window. You could only manage the spiral of a nautilus, which she said was cheating because it was just a line that kept turning. The summer you left, she gave you a drawing of a seahorse curled round a pencil and said it was a map to somewhere you would have to find for yourself.

Tamsin is not here. Dilys tells you she runs a shop in Padstow now that sells sea glass and bad coffee, that she never married, and that she still walks down to the slipway on Thursdays. You nod and think about the drawing folded in the back of your diary, its crease worn soft as cloth.

When the lights dim for the slideshow, a photograph of the old harbour fills the wall, and in the corner of the frame is the slipway, the iron rail, and a small figure with a pencil behind her ear. You leave the cup on the cabinet, walk out past the coats, and take the coast road south, because the tide table you read at the bus stop says the rocks will be bare enough to reach.