Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a rearing horned creature with splashes of red, orange, blue and teal across a person's upper back.

Watercolour horned creature on a shoulder blade

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A rearing creature with curled horns, its body drawn in bold black outlines, sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. Loose, bleeding washes of red, orange, yellow, turquoise and purple surround the figure, with fine splatters trailing off its outline. The composition is centred and fills most of the frame, with the soft skin tones of the back visible around the design.

Back Creature Horn Ram Splashes Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram had already gone over the weir when Hettie Crowther noticed the vats were burning. Nobody saw it leave. One moment it was standing in the dye-yard, black as a coal sack, its curled horns scraping the washing line, and the next it was a shape of orange and smoke rearing against the sky above the mill race.

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Her husband had bought it at Skipton market for a shilling and a promise, because nobody else would take a beast with horns that coiled back into the skull like a pair of brass spectacles. It had eaten the madder roots, and the indigo, and once a whole bolt of Sunday cloth. The dyers swore the colours had got into its blood. Hettie said nothing, because she was the one who scrubbed the tubs at night and knew the ram had only ever been hungry.

By morning the water below the weir ran red, then turquoise, then a bruised violet that the fishermen swore was the ram's breath. Folk came down with buckets to see. Hettie stood on the wet stone with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and watched the bright threads drift past her boots, thinning, until the river was only river again.

They found the ram a mile downstream, standing knee-deep in a shallow bend with its horns still curled and its flanks streaked with every colour in the yard. It did not come when she called. It only looked at her across the water, then lowered its head to drink, and the ripples around its muzzle flared once, gold, before going clear.