Black and grey tattoo on the side ribs showing a crow inside a dark crescent, a rabbit, a falling figure in a dress with smoke-like tendrils, and the words let go in script.

Rabbit, crow and falling figure on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A side-ribs tattoo shows a crow perched inside a dark crescent shape above a rabbit standing on its hind legs and a figure in a dress tumbling downwards amid wispy smoke-like tendrils. The linework is fine and sketchy, with soft grey shading building depth in the crescent and the figure. The small script reading let go sits to the lower right, and the composition runs diagonally down the ribcage.

Ribs Crow Bird Rabbit Crescent moon Smoke Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wasps in the windfalls. Late August, this is, when the Bramley branches start to lean and the orchard goes quiet before the picking. My grandmother told this one under the same tree, so it has to be told here.

Keep reading

There was a girl called Ysolde Pettiward who lived at the edge of Harrow Wold, and she had a hare for a friend. The hare stood up on his hind legs at dusk and talked sense, which is more than most men manage. One evening he told her the moon had got caught in the old pear tree at the bottom of the lane, and that if nobody cut it free by morning, the tides would forget the way home. So she took the hook and the lantern and climbed.

Now a crow had been sitting in the crescent of the moon since the first frost, keeping the tally of who came and went. He looked down at her with one bright eye and said, 'Hold tight to the branch, and whatever the hare tells you, let go of the rope when the smoke comes.' She did not understand him. She never did, not until the bonfire of windfalls caught and the smoke rose in long grey ribbons, and the hare began to shout her name, and the ground came up to meet her.

She fell a long way that night, past the stars and the orchard and her own name, and she was not afraid, because she had been told. When at last she opened her hands, the moon came loose and went rolling back into the sky like a dropped coin, and the crow flew after it, laughing like a rusty gate.

And that, my dears, is why you never climb a pear tree at night without first asking the bird.