Photo of a unicorn tattoo with black linework and a purple and blue watercolour mane, with a small heart and dots nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Unicorn with watercolour mane

Colour · Photo

A unicorn's head and neck in profile, with a long flowing mane shaded in purple and turquoise. Thin black linework outlines the horse and mane, with soft grey shading on the face and neck. A small black heart and a few dots sit to the right and top left on the skin.

Unicorn Horse Mane Heart Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wasps, they're drunk on the windfalls this time of year. My grandmother told this one under the Bramley tree, and she had it from a man who swore he'd seen the thing himself, the summer the blight took the Cox's.

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The orchard then ran down to the river at Hallow Bend, and every August a horse came out of the mist at the bottom of the meadow. Not a horse, mind. It had a single spiral of bone standing from its brow, and its mane was the colour of a bruise going off, purple at the root and running to turquoise at the ends, as though someone had dipped the tail in the river and forgotten to wring it out. Nobody could catch it. Plenty tried, with apples held out like bribes.

Old Ada Pryce, who kept the orchard gate, decided she would not chase it. She sat on the wall with a bowl of windfalls and waited. On the ninth evening it came and took one from her palm, and then it looked at her the way a stranger looks at a house they used to live in, and it said, quite plainly, "The river wants its water back." Then it went off into the dusk, and the mane kept shining long after the body had gone.

Ada walked down to the Bend the next morning and found the river low, and in the silt a silver ring she'd dropped as a girl. She put it on. She never did say what she'd promised, but the orchard gave its best crop that year, and nobody has tried to catch the horse since.