Colour realism tattoo of a brown horse rearing on the side of a torso, with a partial lion head tattooed behind it on the ribs.

Realistic horse tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo of a brown horse with a flowing dark mane, shown mid-stride with one foreleg raised. The shading is smooth and detailed, with highlights on the coat and muscle, and a partial orange lion's head sits to the right. The photograph is taken close on the side of a bare torso, with the horse filling most of the frame.

Realism Ribs Horse Lion Mane Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bay came through the orchard gate the week the plums were coming down, and nobody in Hollin Lane could say afterwards who had left it open. My grandfather swore it was the wind. My mother blamed the Pritchard boys, who had a grudge against the cider press. I only knew that when I came out with the pail at six, the mare was standing between the Victoria trees with her head up and her mane lifting, as if she had been waiting for someone to notice her.

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She was not ours. She belonged to the riding school over at Stanway, had been sold on, then sold again, and nobody had told her she was finished being moved about. I stood still with the windfalls rolling round my boots. Late August smelled of bruised fruit and wasps, and the grass was gold to the knee. She tossed her head once, then went down the rows at a trot that turned into something longer, one foreleg lifted high, as if she were stepping over a gate only she could see.

I did not try to catch her. I opened the far gate instead, set the pail down, and talked to her the way Dad talked to the ewes at lambing. Beyond the hedge a dog barked, and the carved lion off Mr Tully's gatepost, the one that had lost its nose in a hailstorm, went clattering across the yard in the wheelbarrow. The mare swung round at the noise, flared and furious and entirely alive. For a moment she and I were the only things in that orchard not falling.

She walked back to Stanway by herself that evening, along the lane with the sun on her flank. I kept the last windfall I had picked from under her hooves. It sits on my windowsill now, gone soft and brown. Nobody asked me to explain the gate. Some things are left open for a single summer and then shut again.