Watercolour design of a raccoon with its front paws raised to its face, surrounded by small red hearts on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour raccoon with red hearts

Mixed · Flash

A watercolour drawing of a raccoon with its front paws raised to its face, looking out with dark eyes. Loose brushwork gives soft brown and grey shading in the fur, with white markings on the muzzle and ears. Small red hearts scatter above and around its head against a plain white background.

Heart Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has banned the raccoon from the refectory, so you have been sent to the herb beds at dawn with a bread knife and orders to look severe. The animal sits on the compost lid with both front paws pressed over its mouth, as though it has just been caught saying something it ought not to. Red hearts drift up from its head like sparks from a bonfire and catch in the cold air above the cloister wall.

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The rule book covers foxes, rats and the abbey cat's temper. It says nothing about hearts. You square your shoulders and tell the creature, in your most official voice, that it must leave. It peeks out between its fingers. Its eyes are dark and wet and entirely unrepentant, and a heart lifts from one ear and settles on the toe of your sandal. You look at it for a long moment. Then you look at the bread knife, which is absurd, and set it down on the wall.

By the time the bell rings for Lauds you have opened the side gate and fed it the heel of yesterday's loaf, which you will confess later. It wanders off down the lane, trailing a few more hearts behind it like a bride's veil. In choir, Anselm frowns at the smear of red on the hem of your habit and says nothing.

He says nothing at Vespers either. That evening, though, there is a fresh row of paper hearts on the compost lid, cut from the back of a hymn sheet with very careful scissors, and beside them, pressed into the mud, a set of small hands.