Black and grey traditional tattoo of a raccoon in a top hat and bow tie, with rose buds, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raccoon in top hat and roses on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A raccoon wearing a top hat, tailcoat and bow tie sits above a cluster of rose buds and open flowers. The linework is bold and dark, with soft grey shading on the fur, jacket and petals. The design fills the length of the calf, with the raccoon centred and the roses spreading out below it.

Traditional Calf Top hat Bow tie Rose Rose bud Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, gather round, and mind the petals, because I'll tell you now that the whole trouble began with a hat. Mr Lionel Thimble was a raccoon of some standing in the town of Harrowgate Cross, and he owned exactly one top hat, one tailcoat with the tails pressed sharp enough to cut bread, and a bow tie he tied himself every morning in the reflection of a biscuit tin. What he did not own was a passport, for the simple reason that nobody in the valley had ever thought to issue one to a raccoon.

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Now the border at Pellow Bridge is a little wooden hut on stilts, with a striped barrier that goes up when the guard feels like it. The guard that Tuesday was a heron called Mrs Aske, who had a ledger, a pencil behind each ear and no patience at all. Thimble came trotting up the road with a bundle of roses under one arm, the white ones that open in the morning and drop by teatime, and he touched his hat and said, "Madam, I am expected on the far bank. The bride is waiting, and the roses will not."

Mrs Aske looked at the ledger, then at the hat, then at the roses, which were already shedding on the tarmac. "Papers," she said. He had none. "Then what's in the sack?" Thimble opened it. There was nothing in it but a tin of biscuits and a folded letter in a blue envelope, which he held up to the light so she could read her own name on the front, in her sister's handwriting.

She read it twice. Then she lifted the barrier, and the petals went rolling down the far slope like a small, slow avalanche of cream silk. Thimble bowed, low enough that his top hat nearly touched the road, and walked on into the valley, leaving a trail of roses behind him for anyone who cared to follow.