Realism style tattoo of a rearing skeletal winged horse with a barbed tail on the forearm, with partial script lettering below.

Skeletal winged horse on forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A rearing skeletal horse with bat-like wings and a barbed tail is shown in shaded greys with purple highlights, with visible ribs, bones and a mane. The shading is smooth and detailed, giving the bones and wing membrane volume against the pale skin. Partial script lettering runs along the bottom edge of the frame and is cut off, and the background shows jeans and a white surface.

Realism Forearm Horse Skeleton Wing Tail Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mare had been dead nine days when she came back up the lane, and Ada Penrose was the only one in the yard who did not run. It was past four and the frost had the ruts set hard as pewter. Ada heard the clatter first, hooves on stone, then saw the bones pass the gate, lit from behind by the last of the sky. Every rib showed. The wings were stretched like wet sacking dried on a line, and the tail ended in a barb like a hook for pulling thorns.

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Her father had buried the mare under the ash tree himself, with a spade that split twice in the cold. He had cried over it in the barn where he thought nobody could see. Now the mare stood steaming in the yard, though she had no breath to steam with, and nosed at the bucket on the step as if she had only been out to the far field.

Ada filled the bucket with oats. She did not know why, except that the old women on the Fell said a beast that came back wanted feeding before anything was asked of it. The mare ate, bone clicking against bone, and when she had finished she knelt the way a horse kneels for a rider and looked at Ada with eyes that had no lids to close.

In the spring the frost lifted and the mare was gone, but the ash tree had a new branch on it, pale and bare as a rib, and nobody on the farm ever again called it a dead horse.