Horse tattoo ideas, meaning and designs

The anatomy that gives a bad drawing away

The hind leg is where most designs fail. A horse's hock bends backward and sits roughly level with the bottom of the belly, and drawings that give it a forward knee look like a dog on stilts. The neck is the second problem: it comes out of the chest at an angle rather than straight up, and its length relative to the body is what separates a thoroughbred from a cob.

Ears and eye placement finish the job. Horse eyes sit on the sides of the head, not the front, so a three quarter view shows one eye properly and the other barely. Ears pinned back mean an angry horse, which is rarely what someone wants for a tattoo of a horse they loved. Check all of this on the stencil.

Check these before the stencil goes on

• Hocks bending backward and sitting level with the belly line
• Neck leaving the chest at an angle
• Eyes on the sides of the head, with one barely visible in three quarter view
• Ears forward or relaxed, since pinned ears read as a horse about to bite

Portraits of a specific horse

Markings identify a horse the way a face identifies a person. A star is a small white patch on the forehead, a blaze is a wide stripe down the face, a snip is a white mark on the muzzle, and white on the legs is a sock or a stocking depending on how far up it goes. Name those to your artist and bring photos showing each one.

For the reference, take pictures from the side of the head at the horse's eye level. Include one of the whole animal standing square so the artist can see proportions. Coat color is worth mentioning too, since a bay, a chestnut and a liver chestnut are very different in black and grey and almost identical in a bad photo.

Styles, size and mane detail

Manes are the horse equivalent of feather detail. Individual strands drawn at 0.3 mm look excellent fresh and merge into one grey mass in five to eight years. Artists who do a lot of horses draw the mane as groups of strands with real black between the groups, which reads as hair from any distance and survives the spread.

A realistic horse head wants 18 to 25 cm. Black and grey suits the subject because coat tone is what gives a horse its form. Blackwork silhouettes of a running horse hold at 10 cm and stay sharp indefinitely. Neo traditional works well at 14 to 18 cm, blocking the mane into shapes and letting a heavy outline carry the drawing.

Sizes by approach

• 8 to 10 cm, running horse silhouette in solid black
• 14 to 18 cm, neo traditional head with a blocked mane
• 18 to 25 cm, realistic head with grouped mane strands and real black
• 30 cm and up, full body horse in motion on a thigh or back

Placement and what people change later

A horse head in profile is close to square and fits the outer upper arm, the shoulder blade or the outer thigh at 15 to 20 cm. A running horse is long and low and suits the forearm, the ribs or the calf. A full body horse in motion needs a big flat area, so most end up on a thigh or an upper back where the artist has 30 cm to work with.

The most common later addition is a name, usually a horse that has since died. Leave space for it at the start if there is any chance. The other regret is the Uffington style abstracted horse rendered too small: the original is a hundred meters long and its thin curving lines want at least 15 cm on skin to keep the shape readable.

Horse designs people ask for

• A portrait of one horse's head with its markings drawn accurately
• Running horse in solid blackwork along the forearm or ribs
• Horseshoe with the open end upward, often with a name inside
• Uffington style abstracted horse at 15 cm or larger
• Carousel horse with a twisted pole, usually neo traditional