Colour traditional tattoo of a seahorse with teal scales, orange spots and a red and brown flower on the inner arm.

Traditional seahorse with a flower on the arm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A seahorse with a curled tail fills the length of the arm, with a teal scaled body, a brown and orange head with a small eye, and a red and brown flower on the torso. Bold black outlines frame the flat fills, and dotted details run along the body and fins. Bright teal, orange, red and brown ink dominate against plain skin, with a soft background of fabric and a blurred workspace.

Traditional Forearm Seahorse Flower Scale Dot Fin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seahorse came out of the coconut shy at Ballard's Fair in Hythe, which is not where seahorses are supposed to come from. Dad swore the man on the stall had filled a glass tank with brine and a fistful of tinsel and was selling the lot as a prize. I was nine and didn't care. I carried it in a jam jar across the car park, water slopping over my wrists, and it turned its stiff little head to watch me the whole way, as if it had opinions about the ride.

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We travelled after that, the rides folded onto the lorry each Monday, the dodgems rattling in the back, Mum driving with the radio off so she could listen to the generator. The seahorse lived on the caravan sill in a bowl of water Dad changed every second night. I named it Mrs Pell after the lady who sold chips at Margate, because she had the same swivel in her neck and the same way of ignoring nonsense.

Autumn came and the fair went south to winter quarters near Dover. Dad said we couldn't keep a sea creature on a sill in the cold, so one dark evening I walked it down to the harbour wall, the jar held against my chest under my coat. The tide was out and the water had gone thick and green. I tipped it over the edge and watched the little curl of its tail vanish into the weed.

Nobody asked where it had gone. Dad pretended not to notice the empty bowl, and Mum sent me to bed early. Next season, when the fair pulled in at Hythe again, I stood by the coconut shy for an hour, watching kids lob wood at the painted coconuts and pretending I wasn't waiting for someone to hand me something alive.