Solid black silhouette of a squirrel with a large bushy tail, drawn on a cream background as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Squirrel silhouette design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a seated squirrel facing right, with a large curled tail rising behind it and a small raised ear on the head. The shape is filled with dark ink or marker with slightly uneven texture and no internal linework or shading. It sits centred on a plain, warm cream background with generous empty space around it.

Squirrel Silhouette

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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

Mind the step, it's slippery where the spray comes in. Right, you'll want the stool by the stove, the one with no leg that wobbles. Now, the squirrel. Everyone on the harbour knows the squirrel, though most of them only ever saw her from the back of a wheelbarrow. Her name was Marisol Penhallow, and she kept the cook's lamp in the back room of the Gull's Rest, the place that burned down the winter the pier went. She had a cat's way of sitting, tail up like a question mark nobody dared answer.

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The trouble started when the parish clerk, a thin man called Atkins who wore his gloves indoors, claimed the lamp oil was his and sent two boys round with a hand-cart to fetch it. Marisol sat on the cart. She did not get up. She sat there in the rain, perfectly still, the way a squirrel sits when it has decided the tree is its own, until the boys gave up and the clerk sent for the constable, who was her cousin and had no stomach for it.

So they went to the magistrate, and the magistrate, who had a weakness for pastry, asked her what she wanted. She said she wanted the oil and the tail of the thing, and nobody could work out what she meant until the clerk stood up and his coat swung open and out fell a sack of hazelnuts. He had been hoarding them in his lining all winter. Half the village had been looking for the squirrel that stole the church roof lead, and it had been him all along, sat in his own wardrobe like a bad dream.

She never did get the oil back. She got the cart, and the clerk walked home that night with his hands in his empty pockets. Marisol kept the lamp lit anyway, out on the step where anyone could see it, and that is why, when you come up the hill tonight, you can still find your way.