Black fine line tattoo of a rearing horse with a flowing swirl over the shoulder, on the upper back.

Rearing horse on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with brown hair falling over one shoulder and partly covering the upper back. A continuous black line forms a rearing horse across the shoulder blade, with a looping swirl extending over the shoulder. The linework is even and uses black ink only, set against warm skin and a blurred indoor background.

Fine line Back Shoulder Horse Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mare would not go through the gate at Vallon until the customs corporal had finished his tea, so we stood in the sleet for the better part of an hour while he dunked his biscuit and read the back of a cigarette packet. Her name was Sorrel on the stable ledger, but the papers at the window called her Lot Fourteen, and she had a way of lifting her forefeet off the wet cobbles as if the ground had asked her something she meant to answer properly.

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My grandfather taught me that a horse follows the line of your arm, never the rope. So I kept my elbow soft and let the lead run loose through my fingers, one unbroken length from the stable in Orsay to the far side of the bridge, where the frontier was nothing more than a white stripe painted across the tarmac and a barrier that lifted when somebody felt like it.

When the corporal finally came out, he studied the bill of sale for a long time. It was one sheet, folded in four, with the mare's markings sketched underneath in my aunt's careful pen: a spiral on the near shoulder, a flourish sweeping down the neck. He asked me to walk her forward. I did, and she went, and then at the white stripe she reared, forelegs pawing the sleet, her mane streaming back like a single long stroke of ink that had decided to become a horse. The corporal stepped away from the window. Then he stamped the paper, handed it over, and said it was the first thing that had made him look up from his form since Easter.

On the far side I unbuckled the halter and ran my hand down her neck. The lead lay in the wet between us, uncut, and I realised she had crossed the border some minutes before the paper did.