Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an antlered hare with a crescent moon behind it, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Antlered hare and crescent moon on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large antlered hare, shown in profile with its front paws raised, fills the thigh. Behind it sits a shaded crescent moon and a larger dotted disc. The linework is bold and the fur is built from fine stippling and flowing strokes, with soft grey shading across the body. The composition is tall and follows the curve of the leg.

Dotwork Thigh Hare Antler Crescent moon Moon Rabbit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Ruth kept the hare on the ninth-floor landing of Halloran House, where the lift never stopped and the bin chute rattled all night. Nobody had seen it arrive. The children said it had antlers like a stag and could run the length of the stairwell before a door had finished closing, and the grown-ups said children said all sorts.

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The council wanted the block down by spring. Men in hi-vis came with measuring wheels and orange tape, and they marked every wall with a cross in marker pen. Ruth sat on the bottom step with a flask of tea and told them the hare had been under the estate longer than the estate had been on the hill. They laughed at her. Over the car park the moon came up early, a thin white crescent, and behind it a second moon, dark and dotted like a pepper pot. The men stopped laughing and went back to their van.

On the last night before the demolition, the hare came down the stairs one landing at a time, front paws raised as if it were stepping over puddles. It stopped in the car park in front of the foreman's van. It did not run. It looked up at the crescent until the foreman looked up too. In the morning the van would not start, and every orange cross on the walls had blurred into a smear of grey, as if someone had rubbed them with a wet thumb.

The block came down in June, and Ruth was moved to a flat on the other side of the road. In the spring a tuft of grey fur was found caught on the railings of the new park gate. The children who play there say that if you walk up the empty stairwell at dusk and count the landings, you will hear something padding ahead of you, always one step short of where you are.