Flash design of a black horse head with a white sugar skull pattern on its face, red roses in its flowing mane and blue leaves, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horse head with sugar skull face and roses

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A horse head in profile with a dark, flowing mane decorated with three red roses and small blue leaves. The face is patterned like a sugar skull, with white and black ornamental swirls and dark eye sockets. The painted shading is smooth and the black mane is set against a plain pale background, with a slight blur along the cut edge at the top.

Neo-trad Botanical Horse Sugar skull Rose Mane Leaves Ornament

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

The black horse came up from the arroyo the week before the Day of the Dead, as he did every year, his mane full of burrs and his flanks still wet from the river. Nobody in Santa Clara del Monte had ever seen him bred or sold. The old men said he belonged to the hill, and that when the marigolds opened he went down to the cemetery to fetch the names nobody had spoken since spring.

Keep reading

The year Inés Ochoa was twelve, she painted his face. Her grandmother had taught her to make sugar skulls for the market, and she took the leftover paste, white and stiff as bone, and swirled it across his muzzle while he stood patient as a saint. She blacked the hollows of his eyes with soot and oil. Then she pinned three roses from the courtyard bush into his mane and tied small blue leaves beneath them with thread. He lowered his head to her shoulder and did not move until she stepped back.

That autumn he stopped at the cemetery gate and would not go through. He stamped and turned in circles, and the priest, who had stopped believing in horses that knew things, went home for his supper. Inés sat on the wall with a lantern and worked it out slowly. Every name the horse had ever carried had been said aloud by someone at the grave. Her brother Tomás had left for the north with a borrowed coat and no letter, and her family had never once said his name at a grave, only at the table, quietly, as if he might still hear it.

She climbed down and walked to the empty plot beside her grandmother's. "Tomás," she said. The horse lifted his painted head, shook the roses loose, and went off down the north road at a canter, the petals falling behind him like a trail of small red lamps.