Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of an upright hare pierced by arrows on the upper arm, with dotwork shading in the fur.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hare with arrows on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A standing hare, shown upright on its hind legs, is drawn with loose, sketchy outlines and feathered linework. Two arrows pierce its side, and dotwork stippling and fine hatching shade the fur and body. The black and grey design fills the upper arm against a plain, light background.

Dotwork Upper arm Hare Rabbit Arrow Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Hollis and Dunmore's has three working poles left and a canvas patched so often it looks like a map of somewhere that no longer exists. Every night you stand at the edge of the sawdust with your grandfather's longbow, waiting for the drum to soften, while Marrow, the hare, rises onto his hind legs on the chalk mark as if he has been asked a question and means to answer it.

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The act has never changed. Three arrows, one for each roll of the drum, and the hare holds his ground while the shafts seem to pass clean through his flank and thud into the straw bales behind him. The trick is in the lamp and the angle, your uncle used to say, and in the hare knowing exactly where not to be. Nobody in the front rows has ever seen an arrow touch him. Tonight the front rows are empty, and the ringmaster, Mr Gisborne, is counting heads with a pencil behind his ear. Thirty-one, he says. The council wants the ground for flats by spring. He doesn't look at the bow when he says it, and you don't look at him.

You draw. The drum rolls and you loose the first arrow, then the second, and the third goes wide into the rigging, where it sticks and quivers above the trapeze. Marrow does not move. He turns his long head and regards you with one dark eye, patient as a clerk. Then he drops from the mark, walks the length of the ring, and sits down in the middle of the sawdust facing the empty benches, the way a man sits in a pew when the service is over and he has nowhere else to go.

You set the bow down and sit beside him. The single lamp above you throws his shadow up the canvas, long and upright, so that for a while he seems to be standing on the wall, ears high, still waiting for the next roll of the drum.