Colour tattoo of a running horse in black and grey shading, set over red, white and blue vertical stripes, on the upper back near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Running horse emblem with stripes on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A running horse with a shaded silhouette and light grey highlights is set in front of three vertical bands in red, white and blue. The linework is bold and clean, with the shading giving the horse a metallic, emblem-like finish. The design is centred on the upper back, with the horse's head pointing left and its legs stretched out to the right.

Back Horse Stripe Emblem

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

Tom Harrow had been rehanging the gate for an hour when the mare came out of the larches, grey as wet slate, and stood at the edge of the clearing as if she had been sent to inspect his work. Her mane lifted to one side though there was no wind. Behind her, the parish notice board still carried three painted bands of red, white and blue, faded to the colour of old sweets, that had gone up for the summer fair and never come down.

Keep reading

The old men at the Fleece said the mare had belonged to the Pell estate before it was broken up, and that she had run into the forest the winter the house was sold and never been caught. Children claimed she could outrun the carrier's cart on the Ludlow road. Tom's grandfather had shod her once, when she was young and still let people near, and he used to say that a horse like that did not get tamed, only borrowed for a while.

Tom tipped a bucket of oats onto the grass and stepped back. She did not come closer. She dipped her head, then turned and ran, legs stretched long and low across the clearing, and for a moment the light caught her flank and she looked less like a horse than a thing cast from polished tin. He followed her as far as the stream, where his boot went in to the ankle, and when he looked down there was a flattened badge in the mud, a running horse stamped into it, worn bright by years of rain.

He carried it back and nailed it to the gatepost beside the hinge. In the morning the gate swung true for the first time in a decade, and round the post, pressed deep into the wet earth, ran a ring of hoofprints, neat and close, as if somebody had walked a circle to make sure it was done properly.