Horse head with flowing mane

Black and grey · Flash

A horse head faces down and to the left, with a long mane streaming back over the neck and a tail-like curve sweeping down the right side. The design uses bold, tapering black linework with sharp swept strokes in the mane and fine contour lines around the eye and muzzle. It is drawn in solid black on plain white with no shading, colour or background.

Horse Horse head Mane Line art

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mare had already gone through the broken postern gate by the time you reached the courtyard, her mane streaming back over the flagstones like smoke off a snuffed lamp. Nobody kept horses at Harrowgate any more. The stables had lost their roof years ago, and old Tobias Quail had been carried down to the village on a hurdle before that. Yet there she stood among the nettles, her head turned away from you as if the ruined keep were beneath her notice.

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You followed her down the steep path to the shore, where the sea had eaten the lower curtain wall and left the chapel standing alone on its rock. Weed slicked the stones. She waited at the edge of the tide with her tail a long dark stroke against the sky, and when you reached for a halter that was not there, she simply walked into the shallows. The water rose to her knees, then her chest. The mane lifted and fell over the waves like a flag nobody had told to come down.

Your grandmother used to say the Harrowgate horses were never bred, only let go. Every hundred years the castle sent one out to find a rider worth the trouble, and the rider always had to swim for it. You had laughed at that as a child. Now the water was black around her neck and the spray was tearing off the top of each swell, and you found you had already unlaced your boots.

You did not go in. You stood on the wet stones until the last dark curl of mane dissolved into the foam, then climbed back up to the gatehouse. In the courtyard the nettles lay bent in one long line, as if something heavy had passed through them at a walk, and the gate, broken for thirty years, swung shut behind you on its own.