Black outline tattoo of a simple sheep in profile on a leg, shown against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline sheep on a leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A single sheep in side profile, drawn as a bold black outline with a solid black head and legs. The interior of the fleece is left unshaded, showing the skin tone. The tattoo sits centrally on a limb against a near-black background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming sideways across the cobbles since seven, and by eleven the tarpaulin over my wool stall in Kendal had sagged into a bowl I kept emptying with a yard broom. Nobody buys fleece in a downpour. I was recounting skeins for the third time when Tom Ridley ducked under the awning with his collar up and a parcel wrapped in a feed sack.

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"Gran's ewe, Nell," he said, setting it on the trestle. "Sheared Tuesday. She was the only blackface on the top pasture that never once went through a gate the way the others did. Always looking for the way round." He pulled the sack back. The fleece was creamy and heavy with lanolin, and when I lifted a corner I saw what he meant: the wool was white right through, but the head and legs had stayed the colour of peat water, as if the sheep had only been dipped at the front.

"Not many people want a black-faced blanket," I said.

"Then sell the white and keep the bit that's different," Tom said, and went off to find his bus before it stopped running.

A woman buying a christening shawl for her sister's baby asked me, while I wrapped it, why the sheep in the pattern looked so cross. I told her it had its reasons. By five the rain had thinned to a drizzle and the stalls were coming down. I kept Nell's cut-off lock of black wool in my apron pocket, the one that had been left on the gate, and when I walked home past the cattle market I counted the lamps along the wall like sheep. The last one was dark at the top and bright everywhere else, and I let it go through.

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