Black line drawing of a sitting rabbit built from spirals and flowing curves, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Spiral-patterned rabbit line design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised rabbit sits upright, facing left, with its long ears and body formed from continuous black outlines. The body, ears and tail are filled with spiral and swirling curve patterns, with a large spiral forming the haunch. The image is a single-colour outline on white, with no shading.

Rabbit Spiral Swirl Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Mary Ann went out every morning from Scarrow Cove with eleven men aboard and an old grey rabbit painted on her bow, sitting up on its haunch with its ears laid back as if it were listening for the tide. Nobody in the village could say who had painted it. Old Tamsin Kell claimed the rabbit had come down off the cliff the winter the harbour froze, and that it turned its head whenever the sea was about to change its mind.

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One October the fog came in thick as wool and the Mary Ann did not come home. The women stood on the quay with lanterns until the lanterns guttered. Tamsin walked out to the end of the wall and talked to the water, the way you talk to a dog that has run off. She said the rabbit would find its own way, because it had always been a creature that went round and round until it reached the middle, and the middle was where the men would be.

Toward dawn a sound came from the west, not a horn but a long rope of whistling that rose and fell and curled back on itself. The men followed it. Each time the fog thickened the whistle wound tighter, until the boat slid past the rocks at the mouth of the cove with her bow pointing at the spiral of the old breakwater. Ned Carrow, who had been at the tiller all night, swore afterwards that the rabbit on the bow had turned its head.

The rabbit is still on the bow, though the paint has gone the colour of driftwood. Nobody repaints it. When the children ask why it faces the land and not the sea, Tamsin's granddaughter tells them it is watching for the way home, and that is why the boats always come back.