Black line drawing of a rearing unicorn with ornate swirling linework in its mane, tail and body, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rearing unicorn with swirling mane line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A rearing unicorn faces left with its forelegs raised, horn pointing up and head turned toward the viewer. Its mane, tail and body are filled with flowing decorative curls and scrolls drawn in uniform black outline. The image is a plain black and white design on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Unicorn Horse Horn Mane Swirl Scroll Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire had burned down to embers by the time Old Maud reached the part about the reunion, and the children in the back row had stopped fidgeting. Forty years, she said, since the Ashby sisters had left the village with their trunks and their grievances, and not one of them had come back until the spring the bridge washed out. They came in their good coats, pretending they had only stopped by on the way to somewhere else. Their mother had kept a unicorn carved above the scullery door, rearing with its forelegs up and its mane curling like smoke off a wick, and every one of them had sworn as girls that it was only wood.

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It was the youngest, Thea, who went to the scullery first. The carving was gone. In its place hung a bare nail and a scrap of paper folded small, and on it, in their mother's looping hand, a single line: the beast only ever left for the one who stopped looking at it. Nobody laughed. The eldest sister, who had never once in her life admitted to being wrong, sat down on the flagstones and took off her gloves.

So they did the thing their mother would have wanted, which was to stop talking and start mending. They scrubbed the flags, rehung the door, and sat in the kitchen until the tea went cold. When the bridge was rebuilt that autumn, the carving was found wedged in the mud beneath it, horn snapped, hooves still lifted, as if it had been trying to climb out of the water and had decided, at the last moment, to go home instead.

That is why, children, the unicorn is back over the scullery door, and why no one in that house is allowed to say the word wood. Now bank the fire and go to bed.