Black and grey tattoo of three overlapping horseshoes shaded to look like metal, sitting on the lower torso above a striped waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three overlapping horseshoes tattoo

Other · Black and grey · Photo

Three horseshoes overlap in a row, with the central one crossing over the other two. The linework is dark and the shading is grey, with highlights and nail holes rendered to give the metal a three-dimensional look. The tattoo sits centrally across skin on the lower torso, above the edge of a striped garment.

Other Horseshoe

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 mare had thrown her near fore in the lane below Pilling's orchard, and Dilys Crane was not going to walk her two miles home on a bare hoof in August heat. Her father's forge stood at the orchard's edge with its doors propped open, and the air smelt of windfall apples going sweet in the long grass. She had the bellows going before the mare was tied up.

Keep reading

Tom Ashby came down the track at noon with a cart and a face like a shut gate. He had come to buy a set of shoes for his new bay, and when he saw the three old horseshoes hanging from the beam above the anvil, he went quiet. They had hung there since her grandfather's time, rusted brown, their nail holes black with age. "Those aren't for sale," Dilys said, before he could ask. "Nor is the story that goes with them."

He asked anyway, so she told him. Her grandfather had been given three shoes by a travelling smith who swore they would only keep their luck if they were never parted. Each one had to cross the others, or the luck slid off like rain from a greased hide. The shoes had come down through the family like that, locked together on a single nail, and nobody had ever tried to pull them apart.

Tom laughed, the first real laugh she had heard from him since the spring. Dilys took the middle shoe in her tongs, heated it until it glowed the colour of the sunset over the orchard wall, and bent its arms through the other two while they were still soft. When it cooled, the three of them would not come apart without a hammer and a grudge. "There," she said. "You can have the cart. You'll have to take the luck with it.