Colour tattoo of a seahorse in teal and purple with black linework and soft shading, on the forearm.

Teal and purple seahorse on an arm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A seahorse curls upward with its snout pointing left, its body and tail finished in teal and violet. Fine black outlines mark the spiny ridges and segmented body, with soft, blended shading across the belly and tail. The design sits alone against plain skin in a close, centred crop.

Forearm Seahorse Sea creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, The tide was wrong again at Gravesend, so we tied up under the willows and I have had a whole evening to myself with the lamp and the bilge pump grumbling below. Mam's jar of pickled onions is holding the stove door shut, which tells you how the galley is going.

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The thing you asked about is still in the tin on the shelf above my bunk. The seahorse from the pawnshop in Limehouse, with its curled tail and the stiff spines down its back. Dad swore it was real, dried and varnished, but I think some bored sailor painted it. Last week I held it up to the lamp, and the paint is teal on the head and violet down the tail, like the river at dusk when the mud comes up. The spines are so fine you could catch a thread on them.

Mr Okonedo from the next boat says seahorses are the fathers who carry the young. I laughed and said Dad would never. Then yesterday the lock-keeper's boy came running with a bag of something he'd fished out below the sluice, and inside was a live one, pale and frantic, no bigger than my thumb. It wrapped its tail round my finger as if it had been waiting for someone to hold it.

I put it in the bucket of brackish water by the bow and sat with it until the light went. I am not sending the tin back. I am keeping the living one, and I will tell you the rest when you're home, which I suppose means you'd better write sooner than you have been. Your loving sister, Nell.