Pencil and ink design drawing of a leaping antlered hare decorated with purple dahlia flowers, drawn in dotwork shading on tracing paper.

Leaping hare with antlers and purple dahlias

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A leaping hare with branching antlers is drawn in fine black linework, with its body shaded in stippled dotwork. Large purple dahlia-like flowers sit across the shoulder, haunch and legs, with smaller buds and tendrils around them. The design is placed on translucent paper over red pencil botanical sketches, with handwritten labels for ranunculus and cherry blossom visible on the background sheets.

Dotwork Botanical Hare Antler Dahlia Flower Bud Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My dearest Ilse, the hare came back to the orchard gate on the third night of the frost, and this time she was not alone. Her antlers had grown another tine since the autumn, branching like the bare hazel over the well, and every petal of the dahlias she carried had gone the deep bruised purple of the sky before snow. Old Marrek swore she was the same creature who had leapt the millrace in August, but I told him a hare does not keep the same coat through a whole winter, and he laughed at me with his one good tooth.

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She would not come to the kitchen step, though I left the bran out as I always do. Instead she sat square in the middle of the frozen lane and thumped her hind foot, three times, until I understood she wanted me to follow. I took the lantern and my boots. She led me past the ruined chapel and into the field where the ranunculus grew wild in spring, now only a scatter of black stalks. At the far hedge she stopped beneath the last cherry tree and turned her head, so that I could see the stipple of frost along her flank where the dark dots had gathered like seeds.

That was when I saw the ground had been dug. A small hollow, shallow and neat, lined with dry leaves, and in it a clutch of tiny buds the colour of a bruise, each one tied with a single tendril of bramble. I did not touch them. I only knelt, and the hare pressed her cold nose to my wrist once, then bounded off across the white field as if the whole country were a springboard.

By morning the buds had opened. Come home before the thaw, Ilse. Bring your mother's spade, and tell Marrek he owes me a tooth.