Fine line and dotwork tattoo of a leaping rabbit with crosses, chevrons and dotted lines on the inner wrist, shown in black ink against a dark background.

Leaping rabbit and crosses on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink outline of a rabbit mid-leap sits on the wrist, with small crosses below it and a stacked arrangement of crosses, chevrons and a diamond motif above, linked by fine dotted lines. The rabbit is drawn with thin single-line contours and light stippled shading on its body, while the symbols use crisp lines and dots. The hand is shown palm-down against a plain black background, with the tattoo centred on the lower arm.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Rabbit Cross Chevron Diamond Dotted line Geometric symbol

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the old garden wall has ears and has been listening since before your mother was a thought. Mind the rhubarb. There was a hare in those days, grey as wet slate, who lived under the bean rows of Mrs Abbot's allotment at Coldharbour, and she was the only creature who could read the paths the stars took across the frost.

Keep reading

Every hard night in January the stars came down low over the cabbages to drink from the water butt, and they left their marks in the mud: a little cross here, a row of chevrons there, like the feet of birds that had never learnt to land. The hare learnt to read them. She would sit up on her haunches and follow the diamond in the middle, which was the gate, and then she would leap, all four legs out at once, clean over the north wall and into the dark beyond the parish boundary.

Nobody believed Mrs Abbot when she said the lettuces were being stolen by the sky. Nobody believed the hare either, until the spring the water butt froze solid and the stars had nowhere to drink. Then the hare came back over the wall with a single seed of frost held in her teeth, a seed that would keep the thaw asleep, and she dropped it at the gate of the cross-shaped bed.

Mrs Abbot planted it in March. By midsummer there was a ring of white flowers where the stars had stood, and every rabbit on that lane has been born with a little mark on its back ever since. Or so my grandmother said, and she never once lied about the beans.