Black and grey fine line tattoo of an open hand holding a thin branch on the arm, with a shaded engraved-style hare below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding a branch and hare tattoo

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare arm rests on white bedding printed with small roses. A fine line outline of an open hand holding a thin twig sits above a larger black and grey tattoo of a hare or rabbit, which is drawn with shaded hatching. The composition is soft and natural, with the tattoos framed against the skin and the sheets.

Fine line Other Hand Branch Hare Rabbit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hare came in with the frost, under the back door that Mrs Oakes never bolted because the dough needed the cold draught to prove. I found her at half four, pressed flat against the sack of rye, ears laid back like wet leaves. I did not shout. My father taught me that a frightened thing bites the hand that reaches fastest, so I opened my palm slowly and held out a twig of hawthorn I had snapped off the hedge on my way in.

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She watched the twig for a long while. Outside, the sky over the mill was going from ink to pewter, and the first van rattled along Cannon Street. Then she came forward on her long back legs, one careful step at a time, and took the hawthorn from me the way a child takes a sweet from a stranger. I kept my hand still. My fingers ached with the cold, but I did not move them.

When the loaves came out at six, she was gone and the back door stood open on a square of grey light. In the flour on the bench were small prints, and beside them lay the twig, which I had assumed she dropped. It was not dropped. She had pushed its green end upright into the tray of rising dough, as neatly as a florist would set a stem in a vase.

The loaf baked from that tray rose higher than anything I had ever shaped, and Mrs Oakes swore it was the hawthorn. Every morning since, before the ovens light, I leave the door a finger's width open for whoever is out there in the frost.