Black and grey horseshoe tattoo with small flowers and leaves on the inner forearm, shaded in an engraved, stippled style.

Horseshoe and flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A horseshoe curves across the forearm with a row of nail holes along its upper edge, and a spray of five-petalled flowers, leaves and small buds sits at its open end. The linework is fine and dark, with the metal shaded by dense hatching and stippling that gives the horseshoe a raised, engraved look. The tattoo is in black and grey against pale skin, set in a blurred garden with a white windmill behind it.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Horseshoe Flower Leaves Bud Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the sun clears the grain elevator, you have shod three horses and your forearms are grey with forge scale. Ansel Pruitt leans in the smithy doorway with his pipe gone cold, watching the Hallorans' mare stamp at the flies. He says she has more sense than most of the men at the feed store. You tell him that is not hard. The rail spur shut in June, and since then Calder Flats has gone quiet the way a clock does when someone forgets to wind it.

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Nobody speaks about the depot any more. Its windows went to plywood, and the windmill behind the Tresler place stopped turning in August and never started again. You keep the forge lit regardless. Each evening you hammer a shoe out of bar stock and punch the nail holes seven to a side, the way Ansel taught you, and each evening he turns it over in his blackened hands, counts the holes twice, and hangs it on the peg without a word. Praise, from Ansel, comes as a silence that lasts a full minute.

On the last Saturday of September you find a shoe on your bench that you did not make. It is older, its iron worn thin at the heel, and someone has pressed a spray of blossom into the open curve: five-petalled flowers, a few leaves, two buds pointed like tiny flames. Ansel says it is what he made for your mother the week before she left for the coast, and that she asked him to keep it until somebody in Calder Flats was brave enough to go. He does not say which of you he means.

You carry it out to the road that evening and nail it above the station door, flowers facing inward, so that anyone who walks out of town has to pass beneath something that chose to grow there anyway. The windmill creaks once in the dusk. Ansel strikes a match behind you, and you hear the forge door close for the night.