Black and grey realism tattoo of a rearing winged horse with flowing mane and wisps of smoke, wrapping around an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged horse realism tattoo on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A rearing winged horse fills the frame, with its head turned to the left, a flowing mane and large feathered wings spread wide. The shading is soft and smooth, with strong highlights on the wings and muzzle and dark shadows that build depth. Only black ink and grey tones are used, and faint swirling smoke curls around the lower body of the horse against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Horse Wing Mane Smoke

Find an artist for this

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 lamp room smelt of paraffin and wet wool, and Dad was still swearing at a cracked wick when I came in to say Mab had gone. Not gone down. Gone up. I'd found the stable gate swinging and her hay still warm on the floor of the lower heading, the way it is when something has been eating fast and listening hard.

Keep reading

Nobody believed me until the night shift came off the cage at six, grey as ash, and Tommy Pell pointed at the sky over the winding wheel. Smoke was lifting from the spoil heap in long pale curls, and through it, bright as a moon, a horse was rising too. Its head was turned back towards us, its mane streaming, and where its shoulders should have been there were wings, broad and feathered, the sort you'd see on a weathervane if the smith had never once been underground.

My grandfather used to say the old pits never ran short of ponies, only of men willing to bring them back up. He said the shaft took what it was owed and gave back whatever it could not hold. I thought that was the kind of thing grandfathers said. Standing in the yard that morning, with the smoke thinning to nothing over the pithead, I was not so sure.

Mab came down the lane at noon, slow and limping, with nothing on her back but a little coal dust and a single white feather caught in the harness ring. Dad worked it free without a word and put it in his tin beside my mother's wedding ring, and we did not speak of the wings again. But the tin was never quite shut after that.