Neo-traditional flash drawing of a pastel green pony with a pink mane, blue bow and saddle, above purple and yellow roses, with a hand holding the paper at the left edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pastel pony and roses design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A drawing of a cartoon-style pony with a pink mane, blue ribbon and decorated saddle, rising above two large roses in lilac and yellow. The outlines are bold and dark, with flat fills and small highlights on the roses and leaves. The palette is pastel and bright, with green, pink, blue and yellow ink set against a cream background, and orange dot shading around the flowers.

Neo-trad Traditional Horse Rose Ribbon Bow Heart Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs officer at Dover wanted to know why a grown woman was driving a painted horse's head across the Channel on her passenger seat. I told him it wasn't a head, it was a carousel pony, and that her name was Marigold, and that she had been repainted three times since 1952 by people who loved her more than their own kitchens. He didn't look convinced, so I lifted the corner of the blanket and let him see the pink mane, the blue bow and the little hearts stitched into the saddle cloth, all of it still bright under the strip lights.

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He asked for paperwork. I had a folder on the seat beside me: a letter from a fairground in Margate closing its doors in 1979, a faded photograph of the ride with three ponies in a row, and a receipt from a haberdasher in Lille for one yard of blue ribbon. He read the receipt twice. Then he read the word "unclaimed" on the letter and his shoulders dropped a little, as if he had once had a pony of his own that somebody else had come to collect.

The roses were the difficulty. Two of them, lilac and butter yellow, had been carved on the base in the last year of the ride, and the man who restored them had painted them so generously that they spilled onto the plinth. The officer asked if they were drugs. I said they were the only thing in the van that had ever been paid for in full.

He stamped the form without another question. Before he waved me on, he reached through the window and tugged the loose blue ribbon back over Marigold's ear, the one that had slipped during the crossing. "Mind the roses on the ramp," he said, and I did.