Black solid-fill horse silhouette tattoo across the side of a person's ribs, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horse silhouette on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a black horse silhouette tattoo across the side of a torso, with the horse's head and mane at the front and its legs trailing towards the hip. The design uses solid black fills with jagged, cut-out edges and small flecks of negative space, with no colour ink. The white garment at the top and the blue waistband at the bottom frame the tattoo against pale skin.

Blackwork Ribs Horse Silhouette Animal

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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

Mind the step, the tide's not in yet, and you'll want your coat when I get to the bit with the wind. Sit where the gull feathers are. Right. This is about Marrow, the grey mare that carried paraffin up Hollin Head for old Tobias Greave, keeper of the light before they put the electric in and took the lamp's breath away.

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It was a black night in November, the sort where the sea comes over the wall like it has a grudge. The big lamp guttered and went out, and Tobias was down with his chest, coughing into a rag. So the mare was harnessed in the dark with a tin of new mantles and a coil of wick wrapped in oilcloth. Up she went, the cliff path a grey ribbon she couldn't see but knew by heart. Her shoes struck sparks off the flint. The wind tore her mane into long black strips and the rain lay flat on her back like a saddle of nails. She didn't stop once. I've heard men say a horse only does what it's told. Marrow did what she wanted, which was to get there.

The lamp came back at four in the morning and a fishing boat came home by it. Tobias lived another winter, and when the mare finally lay down in the spring, old and done, they buried her on the headland with her face to the sea. Now, on a clear night, if you stand on the rocks and look up, the beam crosses her as it turns, and for one breath she's out there on the water, black and jagged and galloping, her shadow thrown across the waves like a road home. Watch for it. It comes round every time the light does.