A small solid black silhouette of a squirrel drawn in ink on lined paper, shown as a tattoo design sketch.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black silhouette squirrel design on paper

Black and grey · Flash

A small squirrel is drawn as a solid black silhouette, with a bushy tail curling up over its back and a raised front paw. It sits alone in the centre of a sheet of lined paper, with a plain light background and no shading. The ink is black and the design has no colour or fine interior detail.

Squirrel Animal Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold still now, and let me finish, for the bread is nearly cold and the fire wants feeding. You want to know why the squirrels of Harrowmere carry their tails over their backs like a question mark that has got its answer? Then listen. The old King of Harrowmere set a tax on every acorn that fell inside his walls, and he hired a clerk called Mistress Pell to count them, and she counted twice whatever she could not count once.

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One autumn a red squirrel named Tobin Quill, who was not quite a squirrel and not quite a ledger, climbed the sealed granary door with a single acorn in his teeth. He had buried eleven hundred of them in the hedgerows before the frost, every one of them owed, and he had never once paid. The guards chased him through the market, past the wool stalls and under the bell tower, and he leapt at last onto the royal sill, where the King sat drinking mulled cider and reading the tally aloud in a voice like a dropped barrel.

Tobin did not beg. He set the acorn down upon the ledger, sat up on his haunches, and flicked his great tail over his back until it arched like a bridge. Then he raised one paw, as if to say the matter was a simple one. The King laughed until he choked, and Mistress Pell stopped counting, and the whole hall went quiet, because nobody in Harrowmere had ever been so plainly unafraid of a sum.

The King gave the squirrels their wood-rights that winter, and the tax was spent on bread for the poor. Mistress Pell still counts the acorns, they say, but only to be sure none are wasted. So when you see a squirrel in the hedge with its tail thrown over its back, know it is still waiting for its answer, and know, too, that the bread is cold now and you had better eat it.