Colour tattoo of a squirrel holding a nut on a grey branch with green leaves, with black outlines and a soft blue wash, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Squirrel on a branch on a lower leg

Calf · Colour · Photo

A squirrel with a bushy orange tail stands on a grey branch, holding a small nut in its front paws. Black linework defines the fur and branch, with soft orange shading on the body and tail. Green leaves sprout from the branch, and a pale blue wash sits behind the squirrel against the skin.

Calf Squirrel Branch Leaves Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor on the fourteenth floor kept a bird table on her balcony, and I was the one who had to carry the peanuts up because my knees were no good for the stairs. That was the spring the squirrel came. Nobody on Ashgrove Court had seen one that high before. The pigeons ran the estate and the foxes ran the bins, but this one came up the outside of the block the way you'd climb a ladder you'd built yourself, tail flicking like a flag somebody had forgotten to take in.

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She named it Mr Pennywhistle, which I thought was daft until I saw it sit up on the rail with a hazelnut clamped in its front paws, turning it round and round as if it were checking the thing for faults. It never ate in a hurry. It would take a nut to the corner of the balcony, bury it in the soil of the geranium pot, then forget where it had put it, and six weeks later a little green shoot would come up through the pansies and Mrs Okafor would clap her hands like a child.

The council wanted the balconies painted that autumn. The men in white overalls came with their ladders and their tins, and for a week the squirrel sat on the far side of the car park, watching them with its head on one side. I thought that was the end of it. Then one morning I came out with the bins and there it was on the low branch of the sycamore by the bin store, perfectly still, a hazelnut in its paws, looking straight up at the fourteenth floor.

Mrs Okafor's flat had a new coat of cream paint and an empty bird table. Nobody told me how she knew it was coming back. I left a bag of nuts on her doormat that evening and never said a word about it.