Realistic black and grey tattoo of two galloping horses with flowing manes and dusty clouds across the side of the ribs.

Two galloping horses on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two horses gallop across the side of the torso, one pale and one nearly black, with flowing manes and tails. The shading is soft and smoky, with fine strands of hair and dusty cloud-like wisps behind and below the animals. The image is in black and grey, and the wide, slightly angled framing shows the whole design.

Realism Ribs Horse Cloud Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift has been dead since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the shopping cutting into your fingers, counting landings the way your nan used to count beads. On the eleventh floor the damp has bled through the paint again, and there they are: two horses running across the stairwell wall, one pale as flour and one black as the bins behind the block. Nobody on the estate can tell you who drew them. Everyone just says they were here before the flats.

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Your brother Sol swears the black one is the stallion from the riding school that stood on this field until the council knocked it down the year you turned nine. He says the mare was called Juniper and could clear a five-bar gate from standing. You never saw either of them. You only saw the dust, rising off the cleared ground all that summer, a brown haze that hung over the car park for weeks and got into everybody's washing.

Last month the demolition crew came back to finish the job, and the dust rose again, thick enough that you could not make out the far blocks. From your kitchen window you watched it roll towards you like weather, and for a moment the shapes moving through it were not machinery at all. The black one was just ahead, mane streaming, and the pale one was driving hard at its shoulder, both of them heading for ground nobody had built on yet.

That evening you go back down to the eleventh floor with a bag of rubbish you have no reason to carry. The stairwell window is grey and the bulbs are out. You press your palm flat against the mare's flank, where the plaster is still cool, and when you lift your hand the grit comes away on your skin, gold in the last of the light.