Colourful realism tattoo of a horse's head with flowing mane, orange feathers and dark birds, covering the whole of a person's back.

Horse portrait with feathers across a full back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large horse head fills the centre of the back, with a dark bird perched above each ear and orange and rust feathers trailing from the mane. The horse is shaded with soft, painterly blending in browns, greys and orange, with a teal wash behind it. The composition is symmetrical and runs from the shoulders to the lower back.

Realism Back Horse Feather Bird Mane Portrait

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the fire, because the wood at the edge of Harrow Wood has never once been dry enough to trust. Old Maddox kept a grey mare called Tansy at the bottom of the lane, and she dropped a bay colt from a stallion nobody would name. When the colt was three he walked into the trees one October and did not come out. Maddox walked the bounds for a month. He found a horseshoe, a length of rein, and a ring of crows that followed him back to the gate every evening.

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The crows were the first thing the village noticed, and then the colours. Each dawn the mist off the water came up thin and teal, and the bracken on the hill turned rust where the colt had stood. Long feathers started turning up on doorsteps, the colour of a fox's tail, and nobody could say where they came from. Maddox's wife swore the colt's mane had gone into the trees with him and that every feather was a single hair grown into something lighter.

On the thirteenth night of the frost, two birds sat on the gatepost, black as coal, and the mare would not be led past them. Maddox took a lamp into the wood without a bridle. He came back at first light with his coat full of feathers and his face wet. He said only that the colt had been waiting in a clearing where the trees opened like a hand, and that it had looked at him the way a horse looks at a man it has decided to forgive.

They say the mare grew sure-footed after that, and so did the village. Some nights, if you stand at the gate and keep quiet, you can hear hooves in the bracken, and something dark lifts from the hedge above your head and takes its time going. Mind the feathers on the step on your way home. Leave them where they lie.