Realistically shaded forearm tattoo of a horse merging into a grey skeletal frame, with teal butterflies drifting off across the skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horse and skeleton with blue butterflies on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A brown horse with a dark mane and tail is shown with its rear half dissolving into a grey skeletal frame, including a ribcage and a long-necked, beaked skull. Teal butterflies trail from the horse and frame in loose arcs across the forearm. Shading is smooth and realistic, with the bones in greys and the horse in warm reds and browns against the pale skin.

Realism Forearm Horse Skeleton Bone Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen the October the fair comes through Spalding with the gallopers and the hook-a-duck, and the mare you have been told not to love is lying in the straw of the back wagon with her hind legs folded wrong. Your uncle Ray says the vet from Boston can't come until Monday. You sit on the tailboard with a bucket of water that you keep refilling, because it gives your hands something to do.

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Mrs Ashdown, who sells bottled eels and sets up the bone stall at the edge of the field, comes over with a paraffin lamp and a flat tin. She looks at the mare for a long time and says nothing about horses. Instead she tells you about the crane she found drowned in the Welland the spring before, how she boiled its frame clean in her copper and kept the skull on a nail above the stall because it looked as if it was about to ask a question.

Near midnight the mare stops breathing hard. You expect the worst, but she gets up, shakes the straw from her mane and walks out into the lamplight. Somewhere between her tail and her withers she comes apart into butterflies, teal as the lamp glass, lifting over the stubble in loose arcs. Where her ribs should be there is only a grey frame, bent at the neck like a bird's, and it takes one step forward and folds down on the grass.

In the morning Mrs Ashdown is gone, her stall packed, and the crane skull sits on your uncle's wagon seat with a note in pencil: keep this for whoever asks where the horse went. You are fourteen. You have been asking all night.