Neo-traditional jackalope with antlers, acorns and leaves tattooed on a forearm, shaded in greys with green and orange accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jackalope and acorns on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A jackalope with antlers and a small blackberry cluster sits in profile inside a thin circle on the forearm. The hare is rendered in soft grey shading with black antler detail, while green leaves and orange-brown acorns fill the lower part of the design. A stippled dotwork crescent below the acorns adds texture to the composition.

Neo-trad Dotwork Forearm Hare Antler Acorn Leaves Blackberry Circle Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rancher's boy had the sack open on the workbench before you reached the back room, and the hare inside was still warm, its antlers, black and forked, slipping out across the oilcloth like a pair of dropped branches. Your uncle Walt lifted one ear with two fingers and said nothing for a long while, which in Ashby Falls, Wyoming, in the autumn of 1953, passed for a verdict.

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The boy said he'd found it under the cottonwoods by the creek, where the blackberry canes grew so thick along the fence that nobody hunted there. Walt wanted to know who had shot it. The boy shrugged and said nobody had, not that he saw, and that was the part that made your skin prickle, because the hare had no wound at all, only a scatter of acorn husks caught in its fur, as if it had been bedding down in oaks on the far slope where no oak had grown for a hundred miles.

Walt set you to work at the bench that evening. You pressed the glass eyes in, mixed the clay for the cheek, and every time you looked up the antlers seemed to have grown a little, pale tines reaching toward the lamp. By midnight the hare looked less like something that had died and more like something that had decided to be looked at.

Before dawn you carried it down to the creek, wrapped in the newspaper your uncle used for packing, and laid it under the cottonwoods where the canes were thickest. Blackberry juice stained your thumbs. When you straightened, the moon hung low over the slope, a thin white crescent, and in the grass at your feet something small and brown was already gathering acorns into a pile for winter.