Black linework tattoo of four cartoon animals in a row along the inner upper arm, shown in a close photograph of bare skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four cartoon animals in a row on the upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows four cartoon animal figures in a horizontal sequence, each shown in a different bent or tumbling pose. The figures are drawn in bold black outline with little or no interior shading, and the skin shows no added colour. The composition runs diagonally across the upper arm from lower left to upper right, with the figures evenly spaced.

Upper arm Cartoon Animal Figure Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the inspector at the Lenz crossing made me unpack the whole suitcase again, and I stood in the cold while he turned over Mama's bag of buttons. He found nothing worth stopping for except the four wooden animals wrapped in your old school jersey. He lifted them out one at a time and set them on the counter like he expected them to bite.

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Uncle Emil carved them the winter before he went to the hospital. The hare is folded in half as if it has just let go of a ledge. The bear is on its back with its paws in the air, and the hound is tumbling head first with its ears flying up. The fourth one is all tail. Emil used to say they had fallen down the stairs of every house he ever lived in, and that falling was the only honest way a thing could travel.

The inspector held the hare up to the lamp and asked what they were for. I told him they were for the bakery window in Vellach, where the children press their noses to the glass. He turned the bear over, looked at its underside for a long time, then said a thing that keeps falling is very hard to count as contraband, and wrote nothing down.

The room above the bakery smells of rye and the stove is still warm this morning. I set the four of them in a row along the sill, the way Emil would have wanted. By dawn the bear had rolled off the edge and landed on the floorboards, still grinning up at the ceiling. I left it there. Come and see them before the frost. Love, Mila.