Black and grey botanical tattoos on two calves, a rabbit with strawberries on the left leg and a fox with mushrooms and blackberries on the right.

Rabbit and fox calf tattoos with botanicals

Botanical · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching calf tattoos show a rabbit head beside strawberry plants and flower stems on the left leg, and a fox head with mushrooms, blackberries and leaves on the right. The work uses fine linework combined with stippled dotwork for fur, fruit and shading. Everything is rendered in black and grey ink, and the legs are photographed against a grey stone wall while the wearer stands in brown suede boots.

Botanical Dotwork Calf Rabbit Fox Strawberry Blackberry Mushroom Flower Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brannock the hare had been counting strawberries since first frost, and by the time the fox came over the wall he had reached forty-one, one more than the tithe demanded and one fewer than he liked. "You're standing in my bed," he said, without looking up.

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Oriel the fox did not step off the bed. She sat on the top stone of the wall, where the day's warmth still lingered in the grey rock, and let her tail hang down over the blackberry canes. Nobody in the kingdom of Lessary Marsh could say exactly where the kingdom ended, only that the road gave up at the hedge and the maps Brannock's grandfather had bought from a pedlar showed nothing but a wavy line and the word *here*. Beyond the hedge, under the old oak, a ring of pale mushrooms rose after every rain, and only foxes and hares knew where to find it.

"I'll show you the ring," Oriel said, "if you give me the forty-first berry."

Brannock thought about his tithe, and about the stoat who collected it, and about the fact that the fox had never once in nine winters told him a lie. He plucked the fruit, still warm and pitted with seed, and held it out. She took it so lightly he barely felt the touch of her teeth. Then she led him through the hedge, and the two of them lay down inside the mushroom ring until the stars had turned past the oak and the air smelled of wet earth and ripe fruit.

At dawn the stoat counted forty-one strawberries on the bed and wrote the number in his ledger. By noon, when Brannock went back to look, there were forty-two, and the wall was still warm where Oriel had sat, and neither of them ever said who had put it there.