Black and grey horse head tattoo with flowing script and a swirl on the top of a bare foot.

Horse head and script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded horse head sits at the top of a bare foot, with its outline and soft grey shading rendered in black ink. A looping line of cursive script and a flourishing swirl run down from beneath the horse toward the toes, and only part of the wording is legible. The photograph is taken from above on a patterned dark brown and white bedspread, and the tattoo is the clear focus.

Lettering Other Horse Horse head Script Swirl Flourish

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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

Hush now, and mind the lamp, it has a temper like your grandfather. The fair came over the hills to Bellavista the winter the river froze solid, and it came with one horse left, a grey mare called Nebbia, who had hauled the wagons since before the showman was born. Her head had gone the colour of rain on slate, and she would not step onto the carousel for anyone, so the carousel stood still all that season and the children cried into their scarves.

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The showman was called Aurelio. He kept a ledger full of debts and a son who wanted to sell the mare to a knacker in Terni. One night before the snow came, Aurelio's daughter Lucia walked out to the wagons with a candle and a tin of oats. She was nine years old and had never once been told where the road went. She sat on an upturned crate and talked to the mare about everything, the lions, the ticket money, the man who swallowed fire, until Nebbia lowered her grey head and breathed warm over the girl's hair.

In the spring Lucia painted a ribbon of letters down the side of the lead wagon, neat as a schoolbook. When her father asked what it said, she told him it said il viaggio, the journey, and that a journey was the only part of anything worth keeping. Nebbia pulled that wagon for eleven more years. Every winter after, the girl walked out with her tin of oats, and the carousel was never sold for scrap.