Skeletal carousel horse with skulls

Mixed · Flash

A skeletal horse stands on a twisted metal carousel pole, with a skull-topped finial above and skulls tucked among the saddle straps on its back. The linework is bold and the body is shaded in dense black and grey, with a rib cage and spine drawn in fine detail. Brown, ochre and red accents appear on the saddle and reins, and small tufts of grass sit at the base on a grey plinth.

Horse Skeleton Skull Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last lamp on the Saltcombe front went out at half past eleven, but the carousel kept turning. Ada could hear its organ wheezing through the boarded stalls, a slow waltz with a dropped note every third bar. Her father had sworn the thing was locked up for the winter, so she went down the sea wall with his spare key in her fist to see for herself.

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The horse nearest the pole was the one nobody would paint. Old Vosper had carved it the year the lifeboat went down off the Ness, with a real leather bridle, rust-red straps and skulls tucked among the girths for the men who never came in. Every child in town knew the rule: ride it once and you would be counted. The organ was playing faster now, and the carved head had turned to watch her.

She climbed on. The leather was cold as paper. The platform lurched and the lamps swung past in a smear of gold. She counted the skulls as they passed, and on the fourth circuit she counted one more than there had been, a small weight settling against her back like a child leaning in to whisper. She wedged a folded ticket under the saddle strap and said the only words she could remember from Vosper's ledger: that's enough, now.

At dawn the stall was locked as her father had left it. Inside, the horse stood still on its pole, and the ticket was gone from the strap. Someone had tied an ochre ribbon round its bridle in a neat bow, the kind a child might make. Ada never rode it again, but each winter after, when the organ started up with nobody near it, she went down to the sea wall and waited for the dropped note, and counted.