Watercolour-style horse head tattoo on the top of a foot, with black script lettering reading live life beneath it.

Watercolour horse head and script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Colour · Photo

A colourful horse head sits on the top of a bare foot, with loose splashes of red, orange, blue, green and purple surrounding it. The horse is rendered with soft blended shading and painterly edges, and the black cursive script below it is crisp and fine. The colour dominates the composition, with a silver ring visible on a toe at the bottom edge of the frame.

Lettering Other Horse Horse head Script Splashes Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pony came up the shaft in June with the light still stinging his eyes, and the whole of Harker Row turned out to see him, the only time I ever saw the men stand in the road bareheaded. Dad said he'd hauled tubs along the Dunmore seam for nine years where the roof never saw a day, and that a pony's eyes go strange in the dark, so for the first week he wouldn't look at anything higher than a boot.

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Uncle Sol had the paint box. He did pub signs in Ashby and the raffle board for the Welfare, and he set up an easel in our yard with the tins lined up like soldiers: vermilion, ochre, a green that smelt of the chemist's. He worked wet into wet, letting the colours bleed wherever they liked. I held the jam jar and kept asking why he didn't pencil the outline first. He said a pencil was for men who'd never been frightened of getting it wrong.

The horse came out of the paper as a head only, turned towards the gate, mane flung up in red and blue as if something had thrown paint at it and it had liked the look of it. When the wash dried, Sol took the finest brush and wrote two words underneath in the curly hand he used for the raffle tickets. He stood back with his cigarette and said the pony had read them already.

Dad carried the painting down to the pit yard the next morning and nailed it above the lamp room door, where the men touched their lamps for luck on the way in. Nobody asked what it meant. I think they knew that a pony who had spent nine years in the dark deserved a bit of colour when he came up squinting, and that the rest of us could take the hint.