Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a grey cartoon pony with a pink mane and a skull on its flank, with a green butterfly and orange and teal swirls, on the leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon pony with skull and swirls on a leg

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A cartoon pony with a grey body, pink mane and a pink bow stands at the centre, with a skull marking on its flank and a small pink bow below. A green butterfly sits above it, and orange and teal scrollwork swirls surround the figure. Bold black outlines and bright, saturated colour fill the composition against the skin.

Neo-trad Other Skull Butterfly Swirl Bow Mane Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pony had been bought off a tinker at the Michaelmas fair for a sack of barley and a promise, and by the spring dance at Clennan Hall everyone in the valley agreed she was the ugliest mare they had ever seen. Her coat was the grey of wet slate. Her mane was pink as the inside of a shell, and someone had tied a bow in it, a small hard knot of ribbon that never came loose. On her shoulder she carried a white skull the size of a thumb, which the fiddler's wife said was a warning and the fiddler said was a joke.

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Nobody asked her to dance. The floor at Clennan was waxed boards laid over an old threshing barn, and the tenant lads wore their boots shined and their collars starched. The mare stood by the door with a green butterfly on the lintel above her head. The butterfly, the only thing in the valley that had ever taken her side, flicked its wings twice whenever the fiddle changed key.

On the night the lamps guttered, the fiddler's bow snapped. Silence fell over the hall, and the mare, who had not been asked, stepped out onto the boards. She turned once on her hind legs, slow and deliberate, and her orange scrollwork curled up off the floor like smoke. She tapped out a rhythm with her hooves that nobody in Clennan had heard before. The fiddler, who had never once been bested by a horse, took up his instrument and followed her.

They danced until the candles were stubs. At dawn the lads swore the bow in her mane had come untied and was gone, and the skull on her flank had grinned. The butterfly was still on the lintel. Nobody asked the mare to dance again, but the fiddler's wife tied a new ribbon in her mane every Michaelmas, and the mare never once let it fall loose.