Black tattoo of a standing horse with ornamental patterning on the upper arm of a woman with long brown hair, in a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental horse on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long brown hair and a black top shows a black horse tattoo on her upper arm, near the shoulder. The horse is in profile, with its head raised and one foreleg lifted, and its body is filled with fine light-coloured decorative patterning. The background is dark and plain, and the tattoo is the main focus of the composition.

Geometric Upper arm Horse

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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

The towpath was under water at Hollin Lock, so Old Tom took the mare off the rope and walked her round by the hedge instead. She did not like the mud. She had pulled coal and cloth and cattle up this cut for eleven years and had never once looked at the water the way she looked at it that March.

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Behind them the barge Wren lay low in the flood, her cabin painted with the same black horse that was cut into her tiller. Tom's father had painted it there, and his father before him, each one copying the last from memory, so the horse had grown long in the leg and fine in the neck, and covered over with little lines like the marks a river leaves on mud. People said it was the only thing on the cut that never tired.

At the far gate the lock keeper said the sluice would not hold past dark. Tom had nothing to tie the barge to but the horse, so he hitched her to the bow line and she set her hooves into the flooded gravel and leaned. The rope sang. For an hour nothing moved. Then the Wren slid off the mud like a boot coming free, and the mare went on up the towpath with her head high and one foreleg lifted, as if she were stepping over something no one else could see.

When they tied up at Thornbury she stood in the stable with straw in her mane and a wet dark line down her flank. Tom looked at the cabin wall. The painted horse had the same lifted foot, though he was certain it had rested on the ground that morning. He did not repaint it. He only went out before light and checked the rope, and found it already coiled.