Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hedgehog curled in a circle beside lupin flowers, with dotted geometric lines, on the upper thigh.

Hedgehog and lupin on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A hedgehog curls inside a circle of stippled dotwork, its spines drawn in fine hatched lines, while lupin flowers and leaves fill the right side. Fine dotted lines form triangular and peaked geometric shapes above and below the circle. The tattoo uses only black ink and grey tones, with shading built from dots and hatching across the composition.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Thigh Flower Leaves Triangle Geometric line Dot Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time you reach the ninth floor the lift has been out for three days and the stairwell smells of bleach and somebody's Sunday chips. The hedgehog is in the bin store again. You find it wedged behind the recycling, curled so tight it could be a dropped cricket ball, its spines bristling with grit from the car park. Mr Oduya on the fourth floor says it has been living under the lupins in the estate's last patch of garden, the purple ones the council forgot to mow, and the new fence has cut it off from its route.

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You know the trick from your nan's allotment: a cardboard box, a tea towel, gloves that don't fit. You kneel on the concrete and count the lupin heads you can see through the railings, seven, eight, a whole pale-green flush of leaves that look like open hands. The hedgehog unrolls one inch at a time, a dotted circle of black eyes and grey snout, and then it stops and considers you the way the planners considered the estate, with weary suspicion and no intention of moving quickly.

You carry it down in the tea towel, then back up again, because the box is too small and the hedgehog has decided the bin store is home. In the end you open the gate in the new fence with the tin snips from the caretaker's cupboard. Nobody asked you to do that. Mr Oduya watches from his window and lifts one hand. By dusk the lupins have been trodden flat by the lads from block C, but the leaves are still standing at the far edge, and the hedgehog's trail of snuffling tracks runs straight through the gap you made, dotted in mud like a line someone drew on purpose.