Black and grey tattoo of a hedgehog with an apple and small flowers on its back, placed on the upper arm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hedgehog with apple and flowers on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hedgehog faces right in profile, with its quills drawn as fine dark strokes and its face and belly left mostly pale. A small apple with a stalk and leaf, and several five-petalled flowers, sit along its back. The ink is black and grey, with soft shading and detailed linework on a light, plain background.

Upper arm Apple Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy's orchard ran down to the brook, and by the first week of October the windfalls lay in the long grass like coins nobody wanted. Tamsin, who was nine and stubborn, had decided the hedgehog under the hedge was the only creature in the parish with any sense. Every evening it came out at dusk, snuffling along the wall, and every evening she left it a saucer of milk and watched it refuse.

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"It isn't hungry for milk," said her uncle, leaning on the gate with his pipe. "Hedgehogs want the fallen ones. Sweet, half-split. Makes them fat for the winter."

So she began dropping apples by the hedge, one at a time, and the hedgehog began to take them. It did not eat them there. It rolled one onto its back, neatly, and walked off with it skewered on its quills toward the old chapel across the lane, where the roof had fallen in on one side. Tamsin followed at a distance, the way you follow a secret.

On the third night she found where it went. Under the broken porch, between the nettles, a little store of apples sat tucked beneath a sheet of dock leaves, and beside it, in a crack of grey stone, a cluster of white flowers had opened out of season, five petals each, as if the frost had forgotten to come. The hedgehog sniffed the flowers, turned once, and went inside the dark.

Tamsin left her last apple on the step that night and went home without the milk. In the morning the apple was gone and a single flower lay in its place, pale and perfect, pressed flat by a stone so it would not blow away.