Black and grey tattoo on a lower back showing a horseshoe wrapped in barbed wire, a butterfly perched on the top and the Hawaiian islands in silhouette.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Horseshoe, barbed wire and butterfly on lower back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A horseshoe sits in the centre of the lower back, with a strand of barbed wire wrapping across it from left to right. A butterfly rests on the upper right of the horseshoe, and a chain of Hawaiian island silhouettes rises between the horseshoe and the butterfly. The piece is rendered in black and grey with soft shading on the horseshoe, wire and butterfly wings, and the skin tone and denim shorts frame it on a plain, close-cropped composition.

Back Horseshoe Butterfly

Find an artist for this

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

Ana Kahale had shod horses since she was eleven, and she knew a bad fence when she saw one. The wire along the paddock at Kaluahine ran loose where the rains had lifted the posts, and the old bay mare had found the gap twice that week. So on the Thursday she took a horseshoe from the nail box, fitted it over the broken post like a ring, and bound the barbed strand through it with pliers and a length of galvanised wire.

Keep reading

Her grandfather had told her the horseshoe was there to catch luck before it blew out to sea. He said luck came up from the water in the early mornings, rode the trade wind over the ridge, and dropped its wings on whatever it found first. Most days it found nothing but cattle and sunburnt boys. That week it found a butterfly the colour of wet ash, blown off course from the islands past the ridge, too tired to fly the last mile.

Ana held out her palm and the butterfly walked onto it. It smelled of salt. She carried it to the fence, where the iron had gathered the morning light, and the insect opened its wings and looked out across the grass at the long, tilted shapes of the islands drawn in the haze, as though checking a map. Then it lifted, circled the horseshoe twice, and settled on the top curve where the iron had warmed.

The mare never found the gap again. Ana kept the horseshoe on that post for thirty years, and the butterfly came back every spring to rest there before setting out across the water. That is how the old men on the ridge learned that a fence can keep a thing in or let it go home, depending on which way you hang the iron.