Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an armed rider with a lance and shield on a horse, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Armed rider on horseback with a lance

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a silhouetted armed rider holding a long lance, with a shield at the side, mounted on a thin-legged horse. The figure is filled with solid black ink in loose, painterly strokes, with a soft grey wash under the horse's body. The design sits centrally on smooth skin against a dark background, with the lance extending diagonally up and to the right.

Blackwork Calf Horse Shield

Find an artist for this

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

The mare was called Pilgrim because she had walked more miles than any horse in Saltcombe, and by the time the tide turned that autumn her legs had gone thin as fishing poles. Old Ansel Rook rode her down the quay each morning with a lance he had sharpened on the grindstone behind the net loft, though nobody in the town had ever seen him fight anything but gulls.

Keep reading

The trouble began with the windmill on the headland. The miller's daughter, Ottilie Dane, had written to the bishop's clerk to say the sails were turning of their own accord and grinding salt into the flour. Ansel took the lance and the dented shield from the church porch and rode out at dawn. Forty fishermen watched from the harbour wall. He came back at noon with his hat missing and a sack of barley tied behind the saddle, and he said only that the windmill had been very tired and was now resting.

Nobody believed him, but the flour was sweet that winter and the sails stood still. Ottilie married a boatbuilder from Penhallow the following spring and hung the lance above her hearth, where it stayed long after Pilgrim was buried under the sea wall.