Fine line black tattoo of a horse's head, with its flowing mane forming a heart shape, on the upper back below the nape of the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horse head in a heart on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single horse head sits inside a heart-shaped outline, with the mane flowing down and around the edges of the heart. The linework is thin and sketched, with no shading, and the design is rendered entirely in black ink on pale skin. The tattoo is centred on the upper back, with the subject's hair pinned up and her face turned away from the camera.

Fine line Back Horse Horse head Heart Mane

Find an artist for this

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

Brother Anselm had kept the stables at Saint Withold's for eleven winters, and in all that time the grey mare Hesper had never let anyone brush her left side. The abbot said it was a fault left by her old owner, a drover from the fens who had beaten her there. Anselm simply left the left side alone and talked to her about the weather while he worked on the right.

Keep reading

The spring the river rose over the lower meadow, a girl came up the causeway carrying a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and asked whether the horse was the one the bells were rung for. Nobody in the valley had rung for a horse before. The girl's name was Idony, and she had walked from the mill at Cold Ashby with a letter saying her mother had died and her father had gone for the sea. Anselm read the letter twice, then gave her a bowl of porridge and a corner by the hay.

In the morning Idony was brushing Hesper's left side, humming a tune with no words, and the mare stood as still as a church pillar. The mane had been knotted for years into a tangle that curled round the neck like a wreath. Idony worked it free strand by strand, and where the hair lay down it fell in long loops that met under the jaw and rose again, so that the whole head sat inside a curve of hair, as if someone had drawn a heart around it with a steady hand.

Anselm never told the abbot about the shape. He wrote it instead in the stable book, beside the date the river went down: the grey mare let the girl brush her, and the girl stayed.