Fine line tattoo of a leaping unicorn with a rainbow trail, drawn in black outline with coloured stripes, on the side of a thigh.

Unicorn with rainbow trail on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black outline of a unicorn leaps across the thigh, with its horn pointing up and its legs stretched out behind. A thin trail of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple stripes runs from its back to the left edge of the image. The linework is a single even black line with no shading, and the colour appears only in the rainbow trail against bare skin.

Fine line Thigh Unicorn Rainbow Horn Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show had been dragging itself along the Fen roads for thirty years, and by the wet autumn it owned one tent with three patches, four ponies and a barrow of toffee apples pushed by a man called Dunstan. Ada Pell ran the ring. She kept a unicorn in a straw-lined crate at the back of the wagons, a grey beast with a horn like a splinter of ice, which her grandmother had won off a fisherman who pulled it from the Wash in his net.

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Nobody had paid to see it in forty years. The old folk said it would leap only for a crowd that had stopped expecting anything, and that when it jumped it left a rainbow behind, low over the sawdust, the way a boat leaves a wake. Ada did not believe a word of it, but she believed in rent. So on the last night of October she set the crate open in an empty field outside Wisbech, with one lantern and no band, and waited.

A girl came first, then her brother, then a farmer holding his hat in both hands. They stood at the rope. Ada lifted the crate lid. The unicorn studied the three of them for a long time, then gathered its legs and leapt out over the rope and the cold stubble, and as it went a band of colour unrolled from its flank, red and orange and yellow, green, blue, violet, lying along the air like a ribbon come loose from a hat. It came down in the dark past the lantern and was gone.

Dunstan gave the three of them toffee apples for nothing the next morning. The farmer came back with his wife, then a cart of his neighbours. By spring the tent had a roof that kept the rain out, and Ada left the crate lid propped open. The old story was only half right. The unicorn had never needed a crowd, only someone willing to watch it go.