Colour traditional tattoo of a red Dala horse with green leaves and orange and pink flowers on the wrist and forearm.

Red Dala horse and flowers on a wrist

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A red Dala horse, a Swedish folk-art motif, sits at the centre of the design, decorated with yellow, green and orange patterning along its body. Green leaves on thin stems and two flowers, one orange and one pink with a yellow centre, frame the horse, with small dots scattered around it. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give the piece a classic folk look, shown on a pale forearm against a blurred wall of flash sheets.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Horse Leaves Flower Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The horse was still tacky with falu red when my father slid it into his lunch tin, wrapped in a clean rag, and said nothing about it all the way up the hill. Anders had carved it that winter from a single length of pine, the way he carved every horse in the village, though his hands had grown too stiff for the fine work. So the green and yellow saddle was mine. I had spent three evenings on it at the kitchen table, copying the scrolls from my grandmother's painted chest and keeping my tongue between my teeth.

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Nobody in Falun spoke of the mine as a thing that could be bargained with, but my mother had lost two brothers to the deep levels and she was not a woman to leave luck to chance. The horse went down the shaft that Monday, braced in the tin against a bolt, and my father came back at dusk with the rag still folded in his pocket. He said the men had sung hymns in the dark when the lamps failed for a quarter hour, and that he had held the tin in his lap and counted the dots on the horse's flank until the light came back.

Anders died in March, before the thaw. My father brought the horse home again and set it on the windowsill, and it stayed there through the spring with a chip gone from one ear that nobody would explain.

In June I carried it up to the spoil heap above the works, where nothing grew but thin grey grass, and I pressed seeds into the cinders one dot at a time, the way the old carver had taught me to mark the cloth. By August there were flowers, orange and pink and rough as a child's drawing, and my father stood beside me with his cap in his hands, looking at them as though they were the only honest thing the company had ever given us.