Dotwork meerkat standing on a wireframe cube with a red sun behind it, tattooed on a calf and partly coloured with multicolour squares.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Meerkat on a cube on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A dotwork meerkat stands upright on a dark red plinth above a black line-drawn cube, with a red sun of concentric arcs behind it and thin black sweeping lines above. Its body is shaded with stippled dots, while a blue dashed outline and a column of small coloured squares in red, yellow, teal and blue add colour. The design wraps up the calf, and the black background isolates it cleanly.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ivy,

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The meerkat has taken to the box again. Every morning since the frost came down on the fairground field, Mr Pim hops up on the old tea chest Dad painted black, lifts his chin at the sun coming up over the Dunmow road, and refuses to come down until someone holds out a mealworm and says the right word. Nobody ever taught him the word. Dad swears it was "Ta", but Dad swears to most things after the second bottle.

The squares on his flank are Mum's old quilting scraps, glued on with rabbit gum the winter before she left. Red, mustard, teal, a blue like a swimming pool in a film. Every time he shuffles, the colours slide and somebody in the crowd shouts that he's been painted. I have stopped correcting them. The blue dashed line round his tail is the ribbon Dad used to fence the act off from the wind, and it has frayed into a ghost of a shape that I can still follow with my eye when I can't sleep.

Yesterday the sun came up red through the thin cloud, the stripes of it rising like a stack of plates, and Pim stood up straight on the chest as if he had been waiting all his life for someone to notice. I noticed. I stood in the mud with the cold in my ankles and watched him. Then the wagon man started the engine and the whole field jolted, and the box slid an inch, and he simply looked down at me, unbothered, as though he were the one keeping time.

We pack up on Thursday. The new site is in Kent, flat and warm, with no frost to speak of. I have asked Dad to leave the chest behind. He said he would think about it, which is what he says when he has already decided.

Love, Nell

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