Black and grey pencil flash design on lined paper showing a rabbit-masked figure with ribs, a jet, a heart, a book, a knife and speech bubbles.

Rabbit-masked figure design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey pencil drawing on lined notebook paper shows a rabbit-masked figure with exposed ribs at the centre, surrounded by speech bubbles, a jet, an envelope, a countdown panel, a heart, an open book and a knife. The linework is bold, with shading and hatching on the figure and objects. The composition fills the page, with phrases such as 'they made me do it', 'cellar door', 'fear' and 'love' placed between the motifs; it is a design sketch rather than a photograph of skin.

Rabbit Mask Ribs Envelope Heart Clock Book Knife Speech bubble Lettering Flame Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hare came up Coldharbour Lane on the Tuesday, same as it had come every Tuesday since the colliery closed, and Mrs Oldroyd swept her step twice to show she was not frightened of it. It stood on its back legs under the post box with a grin stitched into its mask, a split in its coat showing the ribs underneath, and it read every envelope in the box before the postman could get to them.

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Eli Tennant, who was nine and thought himself too old for stories, asked what the numbers meant. Someone had chalked a count on the lamp post by the chapel, and it had been dropping since Michaelmas. Nobody would say what happened at the bottom. His grandfather claimed the hare had been down the old shaft in 1926 and come back up with the men, though only the hare had walked out, and it had been very polite about the arrangement.

On the last night of the count, Eli took a torch and a tin of pear drops down to the cellar door of the working men's club to bargain. The hare was sitting on the bottom step reading a letter that was clearly from his mother, although she was in Scarborough and had never once written to him in capitals. "Nobody made you come," it said, in a voice like a wireless between stations. "Nobody ever does. Mind the third step."

At six the chalk on the lamp post read nothing at all. Eli walked home past windows where every lamp had been lit, and the post box was empty, and in his coat pocket was a small pale sweet he had not put there, along with a letter addressed in his own hand to a boy who had not been born yet.