Small black seahorse tattoo with a curled tail on the side of a person's ankle against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small seahorse tattoo on ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small seahorse silhouette in solid black ink, shown with its snout pointing left and its tail curling into a spiral at the bottom. The linework is bold and uniform, with a simple outline and a few spiky fin details along the back. The tattoo is set against pale skin and a dark background, with no colour ink present.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Pat,

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I am writing this on the train because if I wait until I get home I will talk myself out of it. You asked who I bumped into on Saturday and I said nobody worth mentioning, which was a lie. It was Michael Shanks, the boy who sat behind me in Biology and drew seahorses in the margins of every exercise book he owned. Remember the one he gave me in Year Nine, its tail curled like a fern?

We stood by the squash and the curling sandwiches for an hour. He had spent eleven years on boats out of Peterhead, then came home to nurse his mother, and he still tapped a biro against his teeth when he was thinking. He told me the seahorse was something he had done at nineteen, a bit of nonsense in a back room in Aberdeen, and that he had kept it because it was the only thing he owned that didn't need a reason.

He said the male seahorse carries the eggs, and that it seemed a bit much for a fish to be that gentle in a sea so full of hooks. I told him we had all been fairly gentle at Ashgrove, mostly because nobody had asked us to be anything else. He laughed, a proper laugh, the sort I had not heard since the bus shelter on Mill Lane.

I have his number written on the back of the reunion programme. Write back and tell me whether I should ring him or whether, at fifty-two, I am too old to be this silly about a boy with a biro.

Love, Denise

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