Flash sheet of fifteen small designs, each a sleeping cartoon pony curled inside an outlined heart shape, in a range of pastel and bold colours on a white background.

Sleeping pony hearts flash sheet

Mixed · Flash

A grid of fifteen heart-shaped designs arranged in four rows on a plain white background. Each heart contains a sleeping cartoon pony with closed eyes, and the heart outlines trail into long flowing tails of mane and colour. Most designs are in bright colours such as pink, teal, yellow and purple, while a few are in greyscale.

Heart Cartoon Horse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at Pennick's Fair had asked Tom Ashby to paint sleeping ponies, but the carousel had fifteen empty panels where the old horses used to hang, and the new owner wanted them filled by Saturday. So he sat on an upturned crate under the big top with a tin of cadmium yellow and a jar of water gone the colour of weak tea, and he painted hearts.

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Each one had to hold a pony asleep. Ruth, who ran the candy floss stall and had opinions about everything, kept wandering past to check he hadn't got the tails wrong. "They've got to trail out like they're still moving," she said. "Like the dream hasn't finished with them yet." He told her she sounded like a poster. She told him to mind his brush.

By the eleventh panel his wrist ached and the light under the canvas had gone thin and grey. He sketched the last one in pencil first, a dappled grey pony curled tight, her mane spilling down into a long point. Then he went over it in ink, and when he stood back he saw that the tail of the heart and the tail of the mane were the same line, one unbroken stroke, as if the pony had dreamed herself into the shape.

Saturday came and the panels went up in a row above the painted horses' bright necks. Few people remarked on them. Ruth bought a cone of floss, pointed at the grey one and said, "That's you, all tucked up." Tom, who could not remember anyone ever tucking him in, decided she was probably right.