Realism style tattoo of a rearing winged horse with red and orange flame lines, across a man's upper back and shoulder blade.

Winged horse with flames across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A rearing black and grey horse with feathered wings fills the upper back, with its head turned left and a foreleg raised. Soft smooth shading gives the horse and wings volume, while thin red and orange flame-like lines sweep around the figure. The subject is shown from behind against a dark blue backdrop, with the tattoo occupying most of the frame.

Realism Back Horse Wing Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell found the horse on the lift wall the morning after the fire at the bakery on Cardigan Road. Someone had scratched it into the paint with a key, its wings spread wide enough to fill the panel between the buttons for floors six and seven. A child had gone over the flames with an orange felt tip that smelled of cough sweets. Nell stood with her shopping bags cutting into her fingers and waited for the doors to close before she pressed anything.

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Her gran always said the horse had been on the block since before the block existed, a black stallion that climbed out of the old colliery pond the winter the pit shut, and that it only showed itself to people carrying something heavy. Nell had filed that under nonsense, the sort of thing you told children to stop them leaning on the railings. But the bags were heavy, the lift stuck between four and five, and when it shuddered back to life the painted flames seemed to have crept a little closer to the horse's raised hoof.

She got out at six and did not look back. At the end of the landing the window was open, and the wind coming through smelled of burnt sugar and wet tarmac. Mrs Okafor from number nine was already leaning out, pointing down at the car park, where a small black pony stood under the lamp, its mane lit like a torch and its wings folded tight against its sides.

The pony looked up at Nell as though it had been sent for. It lowered its head to the shopping and waited, and far above them the bakery smoke drifted off over the roofs, carrying the last of the fire away.