Black ink tattoo of four running horses in silhouette, spaced in a diagonal row across the ribs on a side view of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four running horses along the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Four solid black horse silhouettes run in a diagonal line, each slightly smaller than the one before, across the side of the ribcage. The shapes are simple and filled, with no shading or detail inside the outlines, and the ink is entirely black. The photo is a side view taken at close range, with a black bra in the upper edge of the frame.

Ribs Horse Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cage hangs at the pit head of Hollin Bank with its gate open, and you have the grey by the headcollar while the lamp man checks the chain. Behind you the stable yard smells of wet straw and paraffin. Your uncle Emrys always said the ponies knew the drop before the men did, and this morning the grey is stamping at the boards as if he could outrun the winding engine.

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Down in the Low Main the roof talks in small cracks, and the ponies go where you lead them, nose to tail: the grey, then the bay, then the little dun mare with the white hock, and last the foal nobody was meant to bring down at all. You count them at every junction because Emrys taught you to count. Four at the first junction. Four at the second. The foal is so small her hooves knock the rail like a clock.

At the face the lamps dip and someone shouts that the pillar is working, and everybody moves at once. You run with the ponies up the cross-heading toward the light, and they run with you, one after another, the foal's legs going like pistons and the grey's tail streaming out behind him. The men are shouting names you don't catch.

Two days later, when the shift has come back up and Emrys is still sitting on the cage step with his cap in his hands, you walk out of the yard into a flat white afternoon and find the four of them grazing the bank above the sidings, spaced out across the grass from the grey to the foal, each one a little further off than the last, all of them facing the same way.