Shaded grey horseshoes with blue flowers, green leaves and black vines tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Horseshoes and blue flowers on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

Two grey shaded horseshoes sit at the centre of the design, with five-petalled blue flowers with pale centres and green leaves around them. Black curling vines link the elements and frame the composition. The horseshoes use soft grey shading for volume, while the flowers and leaves are filled with flat colour, giving a mixed palette.

Botanical Back Horseshoe Flower Leaf Vine Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming sideways across Wexcombe market since eight, and by half ten Nell Ackroyd had given up pretending the tarp kept anything dry. She stood behind the trestle with a tin bucket of old shoes at her feet, rubbing grease off a hind shoe with her thumb, the iron still faintly warm from the forge in the back of the van.

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A man in a waxed jacket stopped, picked up the larger of the pair and turned it over in his hands. He asked whether it had come off anything worth remembering. "A grey mare called Dimity," she said. "Twenty-two years. She kicked my dad through a stable door, and he still brought her a carrot every morning." He laughed, bought nothing and walked on towards the fish stall.

Her father had nailed the horseshoes to boards in pairs, the way he always had, and every spring the forget-me-nots came up through the cobbles by the bins, blue as a gas flame. Nobody ever picked them. Nell had started tying a few stems to the handles of whatever she sold, a habit he would have called soft. The stems went limp in the wet, but they stayed.

At one o'clock the rain thinned to nothing and the sun broke over the church roof. She sold the last pair to a girl with a pushchair who wanted them for a garden gate. Nell wrapped them in newspaper, then tipped the empty bucket and found a single flower stuck to the bottom, pressed flat, its centre still pale. She put it in her coat pocket and went to find the van.