Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an oval frame with roses, leaves, antlers and two hares, on the outer thigh.

Oval rose frame with hares on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

An oval frame sits on the thigh, decorated with a large rose at the top, two hares climbing its edges and a cluster of roses with antlers and leaves at the bottom. The linework is fine and the shading is built from stippled dots, giving the roses and animals soft tonal depth. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and fills the upper thigh, with the centre of the frame left as bare skin.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Rose Hare Frame Oval Antler Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came to our workshop in Holt in the back of a carrier's van, wrapped in sacking, and Mr Vell swore all the way up the stairs. It was walnut, carved with roses and seeded with stippled dots like frost on a window, and two hares ran up its sides with their ears laid flat as if something had startled them mid-bolt. Mrs Ashby had ordered it for her daughter's wedding. The oval in the middle was meant to hold a portrait of the bride.

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Vell sent for Ada Thorne, who could paint a face when nobody else in the county could. She sat with the girl three afternoons running in the vicarage garden, and each evening she came back with her brush case and a grey look. "She keeps turning her head," Ada said. "Every time I get the jaw right, she glances at the window and it's gone." We laid the frame flat on the bench, and it sat there, an empty ring with the hares gazing out at nothing.

On the Friday before the service, a hare came in through the open loft door and sat on the bench beside the frame, bold as a churchwarden. Ada laughed and flung a rag at it. It did not budge. It only looked at the empty centre, then at her, then back again, until she set down her palette and stopped laughing.

She took the frame to the church unpainted on the Saturday morning and hung it at the altar end with a length of green ribbon. The bride came up the aisle in a plain cream dress, and as she passed the frame she stepped into the bare oval without meaning to, and turned to see who was watching. The hares, carved mid-leap on either side of her, had their heads lifted. Ada said afterwards she could have sworn they were following her.