Black bare-branched trees framing a green ringed sun with a red centre and red rabbits, tattooed on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Trees and rabbits on a calf

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A tattoo on the lower leg shows two large black bare-branched trees framing a green sun or moon with pale concentric rings and a red centre. Small red rabbits sit among the roots at the base of the trees. The black linework is bold and solid, while the green and red areas are filled with flat colour, and the design fills the leg from top to bottom.

Calf Tree Rabbit Sun Moon Branches

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the moon turned green, Dolores from radiology swore it was the sodium lamps in the car park, and I let her keep that explanation, because at three in the morning on Ward 9 you let people keep their small comforts. From the end window I could see the two old ash trees by the bins, stripped and black as wire, with the moon hung low between them. Its rings looked wet, and the red at its heart was the colour of a fresh cut.

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Round the roots, something was moving. Red rabbits, three or four of them, nosing at the frosted grass as if someone had dropped a dinner there. I told myself the strip light was playing tricks. Mrs Okafor in bed four, who grew up on a Suffolk farm before her hands gave out, did not bother with tricks. She said they came when a ward was about to lose somebody, and she said it the way you'd mention the bins were full.

At four I took the torch out to the bins, partly to prove her wrong. The grass under the trees was bare, with a neat ring of pressed earth where the rabbits had been sitting, and not one of them had left a print. When I looked up the moon had gone back to its ordinary colour, a tired white, and the branches above me had started to look like what they were, which was just branches.

Back on the ward, Mrs Okafor was sitting up with her hair brushed flat and asking for a cup of tea. 'They've gone home,' she said, pleased, and held out her hand for the cup. I made her a proper brew with two sugars, because that was what she liked, and I left the curtain open so she could see the trees.