Black and grey realism tattoo of a cowboy on a barrel racing horse, with the words Courage is being scared, across a woman's upper back.

Barrel racer and horse with quote on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a rider in a cowboy hat leaning forward on a galloping horse, with a stone-like block and the words Courage is being scared beside them. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and detailed, with a faint light blue tint on the horse's face. The woman is photographed from behind on a clinic chair with a turquoise drape, and the composition centres the design on her upper back.

Realism Lettering Back Horse Quote Text Stone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dust hung over the Pinecrest arena the evening Nell Garrity brought her grey mare to the gate. The mare had a white blaze that turned faintly blue under the floodlights, and she was trembling the way a kettle does just before it sings. Nell was seventeen. She had practised the three barrels in the back paddock every dawn since March, and she was still knocking over one barrel in every five runs.

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Her father stood by the chute with a coffee going cold in his hand. He said nothing about the trembling. Instead he nodded across the road at the old stone wall of the feed store, where someone had once painted a line in white letters that had faded to the colour of milk. Courage is being scared. Nell thought it sounded like something off a calendar. Her father said he had read it on a feed sack years back, and it had stuck to him the way burrs stick to wool.

The gate man called her number. She nudged the mare forward, dropped low over the withers, and the first barrel went past so close that her boot brushed the red paint. The second turn was wide, and she felt the crowd lean in. On the third she nearly lost her seat, but the mare dug in with her hindquarters and swung round like a good door on a well-oiled hinge. The bleachers stamped their feet. Nell heard nothing but her own breath and the drum of hooves.

Afterwards she found her father by the horse trailer, both of them slick with sweat. He did not say well done. He just held out the cold coffee, and she drank it down. Behind them the feed store wall caught the last of the light, and the words looked less like advice now and more like a dare she had already answered.