Do you seal what I seal?

It was another beautiful but chilly day. I walked along the coast between the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky. Every way I turned there were potential blips of coast and fields and hills and clouds. Then I looked down and the pattern on this stone seemed to me like a seal floating on its back in the water with its flippers raised.
(Not an uncommon sight hereabouts: the coastal waters of West Wales are the favoured breeding ground of the Atlantic Grey Seal.)

The experience of imagining we see something familiar or recognizable in a random pattern is called pareidolia and it's responsible for all those sightings of religious symbols in vegetables or faces on the moon or clouds like animals. More about it here, well worth reading.

In Wales we have a very famous example of pareidolia in a once hugely popular 1908 painting called Salem by Stanley Curnow Vosper in which the devil is supposed to be visible in the pattern on the shawl of the main figure. The picture and the explanation are here.