Black and grey dotwork tattoo on the inner forearm of a larger four-legged animal bowing its head to nuzzle a small rabbit.

Animal nuzzling a rabbit on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A larger four-legged animal with a long snout bows its head down towards a small seated rabbit, and their noses almost touch. The tattoo uses a fine black outline with stippled dotwork shading on the animal's body and the rabbit's fur. It is shown in black and grey on pale skin, with the design sitting alone in the centre of the forearm against a dark background.

Dotwork Forearm Animal Rabbit Deer Pair

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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 gate at Fennick Cut has been shut for eleven winters, and you are the one who has to open it. Out on the reed flats the water is the colour of weak tea, and the old fencing wire hums when the wind comes off the estuary. You have walked the dyke every morning since the herd stopped coming, counting hoof prints in the silt the way your grandmother counted sheep, and this morning there is a new set beside the old ones, small and round, pressed into a neat circle as though the animal had sat down to think.

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The rabbit is sitting by the sluice when you reach it, grey as ash, ears laid flat against the wet. Half a metre away stands the hind, the last of the great deer that grazed this marsh before the tide took the grazing. She is thinner than the photographs in the archive, her ribs showing like the timbers of a beached boat, and she does not run. She lowers her long head slowly, the way a person bends down to a child, until her nose is almost touching the rabbit's nose. Neither of them moves. You hold your breath and count the seconds, as if counting might make them last.

Your instructions say to scan the animals, log them, and seal the gate behind you. The scanner sits in your pocket, cold and patient. You do not take it out. Instead you think about the seed bank under the ridge, the labelled tins and careful Latin, and how none of it has ever been this simple.

When the hind lifts her head, the rabbit hops once and then stops, looking back at you as if you were the one who needed instructing. You unlatch the gate and leave it swinging wide. Let the tide have the rest of the cut. Some things only need the one good meeting.