Black horseshoe tattoo with a small cross inside it on the front of a thigh, in solid black ink with grey shading.

Horseshoe and cross on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black horseshoe sits on the front of a bare upper thigh, with a small cross standing upright in the centre of its opening. The horseshoe is filled with dark ink and shows soft grey shading along its curve, while the cross is rendered in crisp black lines. The subject is cropped at the shoulders and hips, with a blue sweatshirt, orange shorts and a wooden floor behind.

Thigh Horseshoe Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey mare came in lame again on Tuesday, and I had her on the cross-tie before the rain got into the forge. You will remember Bess. You used to sit on the upturned bucket and count her feet out loud, getting them wrong on purpose so I would correct you.

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Your mother wanted the old shoe nailed above the door when we took the lease, and I never told her the second nail was the one I pulled from the Ashby pit gate. I straightened it in the vice, then went at it with the smallest file until it made two arms and a stem. Folk in the lane think it's a holy thing. It isn't. It's simply the only nail I have ever kept, because it holds fast when all the others work loose in the wet.

Bess's near fore had gone thin at the heel. I drove the new shoes on cold, eight nails a side, and by mistake set the last one through the arm of the cross where I had been keeping it in my apron pocket. I swore at myself for an hour. She stood square after that, and the boy from the Hollins farm came to fetch her and paid in eggs and a bottle of his uncle's cider.

Come home at Michaelmas if the trains run to the market town. I have kept your bucket by the hearth. The mare is sound, the horseshoe is still above the door, and the cross in the middle is the crooked one, the one you would have chosen.

Your father, Tom