Small black fine line tattoo of a mouse head with round ears on the inner forearm, with the arm bent across a floral bedsheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small mouse ears tattoo on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pale arm is folded across a white bedsheet printed with pink flowers and green vines, with dark hair visible at the top of the frame. A tiny tattoo of a mouse head with two round ears sits on the forearm near the elbow. The ink is simple dark outline with minimal shading, and the soft natural light keeps the composition calm and uncluttered.

Fine line Forearm Mouse Mouse ears Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mouse came aboard at Gravesend, a grey thing with a torn left ear, and by the Bay of Biscay she had eaten her way through two sacks of oatmeal and the cook's faith in his own counting. Mrs Pennock, the men called her, after the widow who sold us our tobacco. Nobody would hear of her being put off the ship, because a vessel with no mouse in her hold is a vessel with something wrong below, or so Old Hobbs swore.

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I was the cook's boy, fourteen and ashamed of it, and when Jory Trewin the carpenter offered to ink a mark on my arm for a penny and a mug of rum, I said yes before my mother's voice could catch up with me. He used a needle wrapped in thread and a smudge of lamp soot, and he drew two round ears on my forearm, nothing more. "So they know you've been to sea," he said, "and you've come back soft in the head." It stung like a wasp and I was proud of it for a month.

Off the Horn the sky went the colour of pewter and the wind came round in a single shove. Mrs Pennock was not in the galley. I found her on the foretopmast crosstrees, sitting upright with her grey ears twitching at the swell, and I climbed after her with my heart in my throat. We brought the topsail in with ten minutes to spare. When the squall hit, the deck was white to the rails and Hobbs was shouting my name as though I had been the one to save us.

At Valparaíso I went ashore with my wages and left her aboard, asleep in a biscuit tin. Years later I still rub my thumb over that small dark outline on my arm, the way a man checks a coin in his pocket, and it is always just two ears, pricked and listening.