Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a rearing horse with a long flowing mane, sitting on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rearing horse on upper thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A rearing horse with a long, flowing mane fills the thigh, its head turned to the right and its forelegs raised. The body is built from stippled dots and fine hatched strokes that give the muscles and mane a textured, shaded look. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in black and grey with plain skin tones behind the design.

Dotwork Thigh Horse Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mare came up out of the fen the week after the drains were cut, and nobody in Holme Sluice could agree on her colour. Ash, said the miller. Pewter, said his wife, who had sharper eyes and fewer opinions about horses. Mags Oddy, who kept the ferry, swore she had no colour at all, only the shape of weather moving over the reeds.

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She stood at the sluice gate when the tide bell rang, her mane heavy with sedge and river weed, her head bone pale as a skull left a season on the bank. Her eyes, though, were wet and busy. When the Carrow boy, Tom, went down with a halter and a bucket of oats, she rose onto her hind legs and held her forelegs out over the water as if she meant to step across it to the far side. Tom said afterwards that her hooves were cold as a spring stone, and that she had looked at him the way his mother looked at a bad loaf, sorry for it but not surprised.

After that she walked the dyke every night, slow, counting the lit windows along the lane. The village grew used to hearing her hooves on the causeway, a sound like someone dropping coins into a tin one at a time. Tom kept the bucket filled on the sluice step. Each morning it was empty and the mud was printed with hooves, going out towards the open water and never coming back the same way.

In March the miller's lamp went out early and nobody lit it again. The mare was seen that night at the far bank with her forelegs raised, and by the time Tom reached the gate the mud had taken the shape of one hoof worn thin along its outer edge, as though she had been walking a long way to get somewhere.