Upper arm tattoo of a rearing black hare in hatched blackwork, set against a stippled red moon and red pine trees.

Black hare and red moon on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black hare rears upright across the upper arm, drawn with fine hatched shading and outlined in dark ink. Behind it sits a large red stippled circle, with red pine tree silhouettes rising on either side and fading into the lower part of the design. The piece mixes black hatching with flat red fill and dotted texture, and the hare is centred on the arm.

Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Hare Moon Sun Pine tree Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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I've pinned the raffle ticket from Saturday to the fridge so I stop pretending the evening didn't happen. You said at the bar that nobody remembers your gran's hare story now, but I do. She told it on the bus to Thetford, about the girl who ran past the last pines at dusk and came back a week later with no shoes, swearing the moon had been red the whole time and the hare had stood up on its hind legs to watch her go.

The function room at the Crown had a print on the wall by the coat rack, a black hare reared straight up against a red circle, the pines on either side fading into the bottom edge as if someone had rubbed them out. I stood in front of it while Gary Pryce tried to remember our Latin teacher's first name. The hare was looking off past the frame, not at us, and I kept thinking it had the same stillness your gran used to describe.

Then the lights went up at half eleven and the print was just a print again, a bit crooked, with a drawing pin in each corner. Nobody else seemed to notice anything. I noticed because, when I went back for my scarf, the glass had a smear of red on it at about the height of a shoulder, and two of the pins had been pushed out of the plaster.

I'm not saying anything by it. I'm only saying I'm going up to Thetford in the spring, and if you come, we can walk out past the last pines together and see who stands up first.

Love, Jen