Coloured drawing of a red rose wrapped in green thorned stems across a grey horseshoe on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red rose and thorny vine on a horseshoe

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A grey horseshoe forms the frame of the design, with a large red rose sitting in its centre. Green thorned stems wind across the rose and the lower curve of the horseshoe. The rose is shaded with dark pencil-style hatching and bright red highlights, while the horseshoe has fine grey shading and small nail holes drawn along its length.

Botanical Horseshoe Rose Thorn Vine Stem Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey mare throws a shoe a mile past the sign for Drover's Wells, and by the time you get her hoof up between your knees the wind has already started filling the ruts with sand. Nobody crosses this stretch without a story about a horse, and this one has no intention of walking on bare wall. You bend the clinches back with the claw of the hammer, and the old iron comes away from the hoof with a sigh, like something glad to be finished.

Keep reading

The owner, Nell Harrow, sits on the tailgate of a Ford with a thermos and a single rose standing in a jam jar. It is red as a stop sign, and she says she cut it from the bush by the chapel because she wanted something in the cab that was not dust. She watches you rasp the wall and asks whether you believe in luck. You tell her you believe in nails. She laughs and says her grandmother nailed a horseshoe over every door in town, points up so the luck would not spill out, and grew roses along the fence so the thorns would keep the bad news off the path.

The new shoe goes on with four nails. The mare stamps and blows, and you hold the warm iron in your palm to check the set. Nell offers to pay double for the trouble. You refuse, and she does not argue. Instead she pulls a thorned stem from the jar and winds it twice around the horseshoe charm swinging from her mirror, the way you would tie a ribbon on a gift.

Miles later the sun drops behind the ridge and the cab fills with orange light. The rose has gone soft at the edges, and the green vine is still wrapped around the iron. Behind you the mare is clattering back towards the wells, and each step rings out bright as a bell until the sand swallows the sound.