Two mirrored black and grey dotwork tattoos on the calves, each showing a curled squirrel-like animal beside a hedgehog-like animal, framed by flowers and berries.

Mirrored animal and floral calf tattoos

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two mirrored tattoos sit on the calves, each showing a curled squirrel-like animal wrapped around a smaller hedgehog-like animal, with wild rose blooms, leaves and berries framing the design at the top and bottom. The linework is built from fine stippling and hatching, which gives the fur and foliage a textured, engraved look. The tattoos are rendered entirely in black and grey ink against the skin, and the two designs are arranged symmetrically across both legs.

Dotwork Botanical Calf Squirrel Flower Leaves Berry Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hedgehog came back to the hedge below the wall on the third night of frost, and I knew by the way it moved that it had not found a winter bed of its own. My grandmother's rule was that you never move a sleeping creature, so I left the leaf pile where it was and watched from the kitchen step with the cold coming up through my slippers.

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In the morning the squirrel was there too, which I had not expected. It had come down the wild rose by the gate, the one that has gone wild over the shed since Grandad died, and it sat with its tail tucked under its chin, looking at the hedgehog the way you look at a parcel you have been told not to open. The hips on the rose were already dark and wrinkled. I picked a few for the jam jar and left the rest for them, which felt like a bargain I was making without anybody's permission.

By Sunday they had worked it out between them. The squirrel took the outside of the curl, the hedgehog the middle, and when the wind came round from the east they lay so close that I could not tell where the one animal stopped and the other started. I wrote it down in the back of the seed catalogue, under the list of things to plant in March, because I did not trust myself to remember it properly. Some things only keep their shape when someone else is holding them.