Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a crouching hare with a small orange eye and the words WHAT IS, IS WHAT MUST BE arched above it, on the side of the body.

Crouching hare with arched quote

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A hare sits hunched with its long ears laid back and its head bowed, with its front paws tucked under its chin. The animal is drawn with bold black outlines and soft grey shading on the body, with a small orange-brown eye as the only colour. The quote is set in plain capital letters that follow the curve above the hare, on a fair skin surface.

Traditional Lettering Ribs Hare Rabbit Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolde, the hare was still sitting in the frost when I reached the water meadow below Saltgate, hunched the way they do when the wind has won, ears laid flat along its back and its head bowed over its folded forelegs as if it were listening for something under the ice. The steward had sent me to count the warren for the tithe roll, and I came with my ink pot and my ledger and felt foolish the moment I saw it.

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I have never understood why the townsfolk keep the old words painted on the gate beams. Ask anyone in Merrow and they will tell you the hare sits and the rain comes and nothing a man does changes which. Old Brannoc, who kept the warren for forty years, used to say the words to the animals at dusk, What is, is what must be, and then he would go in to his supper and sleep like a child. I thought him a fool until the spring the harvest failed and he did not complain once.

So I did not count it. I sat on the cold stone beside it and wrote the figures on the back of the roll instead, one zero after another, and when I looked up the hare had lifted its head and was watching me with its one warm amber eye, as though it were the one doing the accounting. Then it tucked its chin back down and did not move again.

I am sending the roll with the steward tomorrow with a blank where the warren should be. Let him dock my wages if he likes. Tell Father I am well, and that I have learned something from a hare, which he will think is the frost talking. Your brother, Teodric.