Small seahorse on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small seahorse in profile faces right, with a spiked crown, a curled tail and a banded body. The linework is thin and dark, and the body is shaded with short hatched and stippled marks. The tattoo sits centrally on the ankle against plain, evenly lit skin, with the rest of the foot out of focus.

Fine line Ankle Seahorse Sea creature Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Calder House had been dead since Tuesday, so the jar came down nineteen flights in the pocket of my parka, knocking against my hip at every landing. Gran's seahorse sat inside it on a bed of cotton wool gone grey at the edges, its spiked crown and banded body dried into the shape of a fish that had forgotten the sea. Dad said we should bin it with the rest of her things. I said it was the only thing she ever let me hold without asking what I was going to break.

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She told me once that seahorses are the only ones where the father carries the babies. He has a pouch under his belly, and the mothers just leave their eggs and swim off. Fair's fair, she said, but nobody writes songs about the dads. She had a way of saying things that made her kitchen feel like the bottom of the sea, all green light and the fridge humming like a pump. I didn't believe her until I checked the library book, and then I believed her too much and started watching the men on our landing wheel their prams up the ramp like they were carrying something precious.

I stopped on the eleventh floor, where the window looks down on the bins and the car park, and held the jar against the glass. In the orange light from the street lamps the seahorse looked almost alive, the ridges along its back catching the glow one by one. Somebody had taped a child's drawing of a sunflower beside the fire door. I thought about Gran hauling her shopping up these stairs for forty years, refusing the lift even on the days it worked.

At the ground floor I didn't take the jar back to the flat. I set it on the shelf in the bin store, between a bottle of bleach and the lost property box, where the lamp from the car park could reach it. Someone would find it there in the morning, Kyle from 4B probably, and decide what it was worth. I climbed back up with my hands empty and my pocket light for the first time all week.