Black dotwork and line tattoo of a stylised horse head with geometric ornament, placed on the inner forearm.

Geometric horse head on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A front-facing horse head outlined in black line, with ears, eyes and muzzle drawn in simple strokes. The interior is filled with dots, diamond and leaf motifs, and triangular geometric bands across the lower face and neck. The design is shown in black ink only, centred on a pale forearm against a plain light wall.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Horse Horse head Geometric Dot Ornament Diamond Leaves Triangle

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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 had come down from the high pasture the week the apples turned, and by the time Dorota found her she was standing among the windfalls at the bottom of Hollin Orchard as if she had been planted there. Nobody in Sallow Cross owned a horse that colour, a grey so pale it looked like frost held up to the light, and nobody could say how she had got through the stone wall.

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Dorota did not try to catch her. She sat on the wall with a basket of Discovery apples in her lap and waited, the way her grandmother had taught her to wait for bees. The mare lowered her head to the grass, lifted it again, and turned her face towards the sun. Across her brow and down her cheeks ran lines of dark, neat pattern: small dots like seed heads, diamonds stacked one inside the other, and leaves that opened at the jaw as though they had been pressed into the hide with a thumb. Dorota had seen the marks on the old carved bench in the church porch and thought nothing of them. Now they seemed to be moving very slightly, the way shadows move under water.

When the mare finally walked to the wall, she did not look at the basket. She looked at Dorota's hands, which were stained green from the wasps' attentions, and then she bent and breathed warm across the back of one of them. Something cool and bright lodged in Dorota's palm. It was a single apple seed, black and polished, with a diamond cut into its skin.

By morning the mare was gone, and the orchard fence was whole again. Dorota planted the seed in the spring, beside the wall, and every late summer since, a little grey colt has come down to drink at the trough and stand very still while she looks for the pattern in its face.