Pencil line drawing of a unicorn head with a flowing swirled mane inside a braided rope oval, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Unicorn head in a rope oval

Black and grey · Flash

A unicorn in profile with its eyes closed, its mane and horn drawn as flowing lines and scrolls, and a flower detail near the cheek and the bridle. The unicorn sits inside an oval frame made of a twisted rope border and braided strands. The drawing uses clean black pencil linework on white paper, with no shading or colour.

Unicorn Horse Rope Mane Swirl Flower Horn Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rope had been coiled so long in the forward locker that it had taken the shape of the hold, and when Mags Tennant hauled it out past Orkney it came up stiff with salt and kinked like old wire. Nobody aboard wanted to splice it. The mate said a rope that had been stowed that tight would only fight you, so they whipped the ends and left it lying across the foredeck while the Maud Halloway beat south into weather that never quite made up its mind.

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It was Tennant's boy, Robbie, who noticed the horse. He was nine and had been sick over the rail for three days, and on the fourth he sat cross-legged by the windlass with a stub of carpenter's pencil and a page torn from the log. He drew the rope first, going round and round in an oval until the loops fell into a braid, and then he put a head in the middle of it. The head had its eyes shut. It had a horn that ran off the edge of the paper, and a mane that poured out over the rope like weed on a tide.

Tennant found it when she came up to change the watch. She expected a ship or a whale. She stood a long time looking at the closed eyes and the little flowers he had put by the bridle, and then she asked him where he had seen a unicorn. He shrugged and said he hadn't, not really, that the rope had seemed to want one.

They made Valparaiso eleven days later, and the rope went ashore with the rest of the gear. Nobody ever saw the drawing again. But Tennant kept a splice of that rope on her kitchen hook in Leith for thirty years, and whenever a storm came in off the Forth she would take it down and run her thumb along the braid until it was soft.