Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horse silhouette filled with grasses

Botanical · Black and grey · Photo

A horse is outlined in solid black ink, with grasses, reeds and seed heads growing up inside its body and along its back. The horse is shown mid-stride with one foreleg raised, and a small patch of grass sits apart from it at the upper left. The image is a close-up in soft natural light, and the tattoo is entirely black and grey.

Botanical Blackwork Horse Grass Wildflower Silhouette Seed head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the grey horse came down from Hollin Wood with the first frost on its back, and every autumn Mab Thorne left a bucket of bran at the stile for it. Nobody in Coldharbour asked where it slept. The children said it was a horse made of meadow that had forgotten how to lie down, and Mab's mother told them to hush before they wished it into the lane.

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The year the bran went uneaten, Mab walked up the wood path with a lantern and found the horse standing in the clearing where the bracken ended. It was caught mid-stride, one foreleg lifted as if it had heard its name, and grass was pushing up through its ribs. Reeds rose along its back. Seed heads nodded from its flanks where the hair should have been, dry and pale in the lantern light. It did not look at her. It looked towards the village, the way a horse does when it has been called and cannot go.

She understood then that it had been walking the meadow down to them every year, one stride at a time, carrying grass in its body so the fields would not go bare over winter. Someone had to hold the gate open. Mab took the lantern back down, cut a green rush from the ditch, and laid it on the stile. Then she went home and did not sleep.

At first light the bucket was empty and the stile was wet with dew. Where the horse had stood, a patch of seed heads grew alone at the edge of the lane, tall and untrampled, and the old men said it was the first thing in Coldharbour to flower that spring. Mab left the bran out again that year, and every year after, and nobody needed to ask whether it came.