Colourful seahorse tattoo with black outlines and green seaweed fronds on a forearm, against a vintage map print.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped seahorse tattoo on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A seahorse with a curled tail is drawn in bold black outline and filled with horizontal bands of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. Pale green seaweed-like fronds sit behind the body, and the piece is shown on the forearm against a beige printed map. The shading is flat and graphic, with colour dominating the composition.

Traditional Forearm Seahorse Seaweed

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad kept the seahorse on the mantelpiece in a jam jar lid of water he changed every Sunday, though it was only painted tin and had never seen the sea. He'd bought it off a barrow at Whitley Bay the summer before the strike, a bright thing with bands of colour like the layers you'd see in a cut seam, red then ochre then a blue that didn't exist below ground.

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Each morning he went down in the cage at six, and each night he came up grey to the elbows. He'd stand over the tin with his cap in his hand as if it might tell him something. Mam said he was daft. I thought he was waiting for the tide.

The winter the pit shut, the lamp-room clock stopped at twenty past four and nobody wound it again. Dad sold the mantel clock but not the seahorse. He took it out to the yard, pressed it into the damp earth beside the coal shed, and told me the sea would find its way up the valley if we were patient enough.

We never did get a sea in the valley. But the spring after, a green stuff came up through the cinders along the wall, thin and wavering like weed, and I went out each morning to check it the way he used to check the cage. Some things come up anyway.