Black and grey botanical tattoo of three hares within a circular wreath of flowers and leaves, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three hares in a botanical wreath on a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three hares are arranged in a loose circle, two leaping and one crouched, inside a wreath of flowers, leaves and a ribbon at the base. The linework and fine stippled shading give the animals and foliage a detailed, engraved look. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the upper back, with a small part of another tattoo visible at the top right edge.

Botanical Realism Back Hare Wreath Flower Leaves Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had been told never to draw hares from memory, because they came out wrong, either too still or too pretty, and the hares on Harrow Skerry were never still. She pinned her sheet to the lid of the flour bin and waited for the wind to drop so her hand would stop shaking. Outside, the barley lay flattened in long stripes where the animals had run all night.

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Her grandmother's engraving tools sat wrapped in oilcloth on the dresser: a burin with a bone handle, a lozenge of hardened steel, a pot of ink gone to a crust. The old woman had cut plates for the island almanac for fifty years and never once put a flower in the margin without a reason. "Hares box to tell you who's winning," she used to say. "Three of them, and nobody wins. That's the bit you want."

So Tamsin drew three. She set two leaping and folded one crouched in the lower corner, then ringed them with the flowers that grew along the dyke: meadowsweet, blue scabious, a late rose the wind had split. She ruled a ribbon beneath and cross-hatched every shadow until the page looked like frost on a window. When she finally lifted the sheet, the hares seemed to be turning inside their circle, and the crouched one had its ears laid back, watching her.

On the morning of the fair she carried the plate down to the harbour and pressed a print onto damp paper for the ferryman. He squinted at it for a long time. "Your gran's hares never looked this cross," he said, and paid her in tea and a pair of good boots. She walked home with the wreath folded under her arm and the wind at her back, feeling the three of them still moving in the margins of her thoughts.