Small black fine line tattoo of a stylised squirrel with a curling tail on the outside of an ankle, shown against a light teal surface.

Squirrel with swirling tail on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a stylised squirrel, drawn in a single dark outline with curling swirls forming the tail. The linework is thin and smooth, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. The design sits on the outer ankle and fills only a small part of the frame, with the foot and lower leg visible against a teal surface.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan said the squirrel had come down off the spoil heap the week after the last shift, when the winding wheel stopped turning and the whole valley went quiet enough to hear the becks. It sat on the allotment wall every evening, tail curled up behind it like a question mark drawn in one unbroken stroke.

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Owen didn't believe in squirrels that waited. He believed in pit ponies, in the cage dropping eight hundred feet with his father in it, and in the price of a cheap pint at the Welfare. But he carried the peanuts up the hill anyway, because she asked, and because the paper bag was the last thing in the house with his dad's handwriting on it.

"It's not the same animal," he said one evening, watching it turn a nut in its paws. "They don't live that long."

"Nobody said it was the same." Nan pulled her cardigan tighter. "It only has to keep coming back to the wall."

Someone had unscrewed the Welfare's brass plate that week and left the holes bare. The squirrel lifted its head at the sound of the bus, then went back to the nut. Owen watched the tail loosen and spiral out, slow as a rope paying off a drum, and understood what she meant: some things would only ever keep turning up, and that would have to be enough.

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