Photograph of a pale white-ink stylised animal tattoo on a forearm, with a blue knit sleeve and a bookshelf behind.

White stylised animal on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A simple stylised animal silhouette in white or pale ink sits on the forearm, with a rounded head, raised ear and tapering legs. The design is bold and flat, with a faint outline visible around the shape. The background is a soft-focus bookshelf and a blue knit sleeve, with a dark strap watch on the wrist.

Forearm Animal Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The horse was meant to be red. Old Brynhild Solvang carved it from a single length of pine the winter the river froze early, and when she came to paint it the red tin was dry and the lid had split in the cold. She had only the lime wash left from the church gate, so she thinned it with a spoon of milk and brushed it on in long, careful strokes, leaving the legs tapering and the raised ear pointing at the door. It came out pale as a candle, and she said it would do.

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The horse went to Ruth, who was six and lived above the post office with her mother, who sorted returns at the lending library on Kirkgate. Ruth carried the horse everywhere. She set it on the top shelf between the blue spines of the atlases, where it could watch the room, and at night she told it which books she had read and which she meant to. By the second summer the white had begun to rub away at the belly and the knees, where small hands held it, until only the rounded head and the ear stayed bright.

In October the library flooded when the beck came over its banks. The lower shelves were lost to water and swollen covers, but the top shelf stayed dry and so did the horse. Ruth's mother lifted it down, turned it over in her hands, and asked, a little sharply, why anyone would paint a thing so it could vanish.

Ruth took the pencil from behind her ear and traced the horse's outline on the wood, slow and careful, so the shape would still be there when the paint had gone. 'It was never meant to stay white,' she said. 'It was meant to stay a horse.'