Black and grey fine line tattoo on a forearm showing a cartoon child on a branch beside a rabbit and a wooden sign reading Edge Keep Off.

Vintage child and sign tattoo on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo runs along the forearm and shows a cartoon child leaning on a horizontal branch, with a small rabbit-like animal below and a wooden signpost reading Edge Keep Off. The lines are thin and even with no shading, giving a simple illustrated look. The scene is shown in a horizontal band across the arm against a plain light background.

Fine line Forearm Child Rabbit Sign Branch Cartoon Text

Find an artist for this

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

You are nine the summer the sign goes up on Skerrin, though nobody admits to painting it. EDGE, KEEP OFF, the letters crooked on a board nailed to the post beside the ledge where the turf simply stops. Your aunt says it is for the sheep. Mabel, the rabbit, who has opinions about everything, says it is for people who want to fall, and she says it with her ears flat, which is how you know she means it.

Keep reading

Mabel is the only creature on the island who can read properly, having learned from a lighthouse almanac left in the wet. She keeps a ledger of everyone who goes near the edge, and you are in it twice already. Today you have brought a tin of biscuits, a length of string and a plan to see where the gulls take the hats they steal from the fishermen. The drop is the only place you can see that from.

You crawl out along the rowan branch that reaches over the cliff, and Mabel takes hold of your jumper hem in her teeth. "Edge keeps off," she says around the wool, "not edge keeps you." Below, the tide has pulled back and left a stair of black rock, and in the shallow pools there is a second sky, pale and upside down, with a gull floating in it like a crumb.

You lean further to see the hats. The sign creaks on its post. Down in the pool, a girl in a sailor's collar is leaning out over her own edge, waving, and you wave back. When you climb down at tea time, Mabel licks her pencil, opens the ledger, and under your name writes in careful capitals: BACK BEFORE TEA.