•Rabbit rules•

Written By jorge cruz

Killer bunnies show up all over medieval manuscripts, often hidden in the margins.

@notattoo_berlin

I did this tattoo at Visions of Ecstasy Studio in Berlin for my dear friend Jacob from Leipzig — and in many ways, the image belongs to him as much as it does to history. He was the one who first brought this strange fragment of medieval imagery to my attention, casually, almost as a curiosity. One of those things you stumble upon once and then can’t unsee.

At first glance, it sounds almost absurd: armed bunnies. Rabbits wielding swords, chasing knights, attacking hunters, sometimes even commanding dogs. But once you start looking, they’re everywhere. Tucked into the margins of medieval manuscripts, hiding in the decorative edges of sacred texts, these small, chaotic scenes keep repeating themselves. They’re easy to miss, but once you notice them, they feel impossible to ignore.

What makes them so compelling is the tension they create. Rabbits are supposed to be harmless. Prey. Fragile. And yet here they are, turning the world upside down — becoming aggressors, warriors, hunters.

The imagery is playful, almost cartoonish, but there’s something unsettling beneath the humor. It feels like a quiet disruption of order, a moment where the expected rules collapse.

No one really knows what these images were meant to represent, and that uncertainty is exactly what draws me in. Some interpretations frame them as medieval jokes — visual punchlines scribbled into the margins by bored monks or illustrators poking fun at authority. Others see satire in them: a way of mocking fear, power, or rigid hierarchies by reversing roles. The weak overpowering the strong. The ridiculous confronting the serious.

And sometimes, they might mean nothing at all. Just nonsense. Visual noise. Doodles made without explanation, without intention to be understood centuries later. Maybe even a small, quiet rebellion — something slipped into the sacred margins where it didn’t quite belong, where it could exist without permission.

I’ve always been drawn to images like this. The overlooked corners of history where humor, ambiguity, and mischief intersect. Where meaning isn’t fixed, and interpretation stays open. These marginal images feel closer to real human impulses than grand narratives ever do. They’re playful, slightly disrespectful, and deeply human.

This particular rabbit came from one of those manuscripts, and when Jacob asked me to tattoo it, he made one very specific choice: he wanted it in red. That single decision shifted everything. The color gave the figure a sharper edge. What had once felt purely playful suddenly carried something darker. Not evil, exactly — but charged. Alert. As if the joke had teeth.

Even though the image is hundreds of years old, it doesn’t feel distant. It feels alive. Like it knows exactly what it’s doing. Like it’s looking back at us, fully aware of its own absurdity. There’s a confidence in it — a wink across centuries — reminding us that humor, subversion, and contradiction have always been part of how people navigate the world.

That’s what we captured in the tattoo. Not an explanation, not a fixed meaning — but the presence of something strange, mischievous, and enduring. An image that refuses to behave.

text by nOT

References:

jorge cruz
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