A man in a white t-shirt and dark trousers holds an apple, showing black and grey fine line tattoos of animals and flowers on his forearms and upper arms.

Black and grey animal tattoos on both arms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph crops out the head and shows the torso, arms and one hand holding a half-eaten apple. Both arms carry many small tattoos of a bird, a deer, a rose, a cactus, fish and a wolf-like head, drawn with dark linework and light shading. The palette is entirely black and grey against a plain white wall and shelf.

Forearm Upper arm Bird Deer Rose Cactus Fish Wolf Animal Flower Apple Wristwatch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engraver's boy had been told never to touch the copper plates, so he drew on everything else. By the time Mrs Hollis climbed the back stairs of the print works in Deptford, the drying room was furred with his animals in pencil and soot: a heron folded into its own reflection, a stag with its head turned as though someone had called its name, a wolf no bigger than a thumbnail tucked beneath the lamp bracket.

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"Sixty plates for the Almanack of Fenland Creatures, Mr Pryce," she said, without looking at the wall, "and you have lost four of them to the river." Pryce rubbed his jaw. The deadline was Friday, and the copper for the perch and the bittern had gone green in the flood. Tobias, who was eleven and held an apple in one hand and a stub of charcoal in the other, said nothing until she asked him directly.

"I can draw the bittern again," he said. "I know its neck by heart." He carried the apple to the windowsill and sketched the perch on the back of an old proof while the light lasted, scales first, then the fins like torn lace. Mrs Hollis watched his hand move and saw the animals rise out of the paper as if they had been waiting underneath it all along.

They printed on Friday. The bittern's neck came out longer than the original, and nobody in the county noticed except the boy, who kept the apple core on the sill for a week out of pure superstition, until it shrank to a brown seed and the wind took it through the open window.