Watercolour-style seahorse tattoo in red, pink and purple on the forearm, with turquoise splashes of ink around it.

Watercolour seahorse on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A seahorse with a curled tail sits centred on the forearm, with a spiky crest of red and pink strokes along its back. The body is built from soft, blended washes of red, pink, purple and blue with no hard outlines, and loose splatters of turquoise spread around the figure. The tattoo is shown close up against a blurred background, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Forearm Seahorse Splash Ocean

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, that one's loose, and keep your voice down because the keeper's wife sleeps in the room under the lamp. You want the seahorse? Then you'll hear about the seahorse. The spring my uncle Tobias came off the Skerry ferry with paint on his cuffs and no money, he swore he'd seen a red one in the rock pools below the old boathouse, bright as a lamp flame, and that it had looked straight at him and blown a little cloud of pink out of its nose. Nobody believed him. Nobody believes a man who's been sleeping in the net loft.

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So he went back down at the next low tide with a jar of linseed and a tin of sea-blue he'd nicked from the harbourmaster, and he sat on the wet weed for three hours painting the water instead of the horse, because, he said, a thing that lives in a splash doesn't stay still long enough to be drawn. He said the colours ran into each other like wine into a tablecloth, and he let them. When the tide turned he had a sheet of paper full of purple bleeding into orange, and in the middle of it, if you tilted your head, a creature curling its tail into a tight spiral like a fern unfurling.

He pinned that sheet above his bunk. Three weeks later the harbour master's boy came up the lighthouse stairs to tell us the rock pools had gone quiet, and every one of them was dyed the colour of Tobias's painting. Here's the thing I never told him: that was the day I stopped doubting him. Now hand me that candle, and mind the step.