Colour tattoo of a worn, floppy-eared toy rabbit above black script lettering on the side of an upper arm.

Worn toy rabbit with script quote on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A brown and pink toy rabbit sits with its head tilted, shaded in soft brown tones with a pale muzzle and a faint blue ground line beneath it. Black cursive script curves below the rabbit, reading a quote in two lines. The linework is clean and the colour is applied with gentle shading, with the design centred on the side of the limb.

Lettering Upper arm Rabbit Quote Script Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rabbit has lost one ear to the mangle and most of its stuffing to the sofa springs, and your mother wants it binned before the Coronation tea. You carry it under your coat anyway, down Chapel Lane where the slates shine after rain and the ironmonger's bell goes off for nobody.

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Mr Abbott at the sweet shop says it looks like something the dog dragged out of the river. Gerald Pike from the top class says the same, louder, and the girls laugh behind their hands. You say nothing. You have learned that the rabbit does not mind being called ugly, because it has been loved so hard that the brown fur has gone thin wherever your thumb goes.

On Saturday you take it to the bandstand on the green, where the grass is still wet, and sit it on the bottom step with its head tilted the way it sits when you read to it. A van from the wireless shop has its radio turned up, playing a dance band tune. You tell the rabbit what Gerald said. Then you tell it what your nan once told you: that a thing becomes real by being loved until it wears thin, and that anyone who cannot see it has only their own eyes to blame.

You walk home with it under your arm, one ear flopping, and at the gate your mother is waiting with the scissors. She looks at the rabbit for a long moment, then fetches a needle and a skein of brown wool, and stitches the ear back on, crooked. She sets it on the kitchen sill, where it becomes the only thing in the window not waiting for anyone.