Black and grey traditional style tattoo on a calf showing a leaping rabbit, a bear trap with a chain, and the words NEVER RENOUNCE FREEDOM beneath it.

Rabbit, bear trap and lettering on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A leaping rabbit sits above an open bear trap with a chain attached, and the words NEVER RENOUNCE FREEDOM appear in bold capitals below. The design uses solid black outlines with fine hatching on the rabbit's fur and flat fills for the trap, with no shading gradients. The tattoo is set against a dark brick wall, with the lower leg filling most of the frame.

Traditional Calf Rabbit Hare Chain Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't tell me the trap was meant for rabbits, because it wasn't. The warrener set it at the gap in the Ferrier hedge to catch the poacher's boy, and he baited it with a crust that smelled of Sunday dinner. Instead it closed on a hare called Tansy, who had been too busy being clever to notice she was walking on the wrong side of the hedge.

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The chain held her when she ran. She dragged the iron through the stubble until the clasp caught on a root, and there she sat through the grey morning while the crows made their remarks. Her foot was not broken, though it felt that way. Every hare in the parish came to look at her from the far bank, and none of them offered to come closer, because a hare who stays near a trap will be next, and everybody knew it.

Then a field mouse crept out from under the stake, sniffed the bent jaws, and told her that pulling only tightens the teeth. Iron left out all night in frost goes brittle, he said, so she must lie still and let the cold do the work. Tansy lay still. When the sun rose and warmed the metal, the teeth loosened with a sound like a dropped spoon, and she slipped free, leaving a tuft of fur on the bent iron.

The warrener hung that trap on his barn nail for the rest of his life. Some autumns a sprig of clover was wedged between the jaws, and nobody ever admitted to putting it there.