•Rabbit rules•

Written By jorge cruz

Armed rabbits, medieval margins, and an image that refuses to behave.

@notattoo_berlin

Armed rabbits, medieval margins, and an image that refuses to behave.

This tattoo was made at Visions of Ecstasy Studio in Berlin for my dear friend Jacob from Leipzig.

In many ways, the image belongs to him as much as it belongs to history. He was the one who first brought this strange fragment of medieval imagery to my attention, almost casually, like one of those things you discover once and then cannot stop seeing.

At first, it sounds absurd: armed rabbits. Rabbits holding swords, chasing knights, attacking hunters, carrying weapons, and sometimes even commanding dogs. But once you start looking, they appear everywhere. Hidden in the margins of medieval manuscripts, tucked into the decorative edges of sacred and illuminated texts, these small violent scenes repeat themselves with surprising confidence. They are easy to miss, but once noticed, they become impossible to ignore.

What makes them so compelling is the reversal they perform. Rabbits are supposed to be harmless: prey, fragile bodies, nervous animals built for escape. In these images, they turn the world upside down. They become aggressors, warriors, hunters. The weak overpowers the strong. The ridiculous confronts the serious. The margin interrupts the centre.

The imagery is playful, almost cartoonish, but there is something unsettling beneath the humour. It feels like a quiet disruption of order, a moment where the expected rules collapse. That is probably why these rabbits continue to feel so alive. They are funny, but the joke is not innocent.

No one knows exactly what all these images were meant to represent. Some interpretations see them as medieval jokes, visual punchlines added by scribes or illustrators into the margins. Others read them as satire: a way of mocking power, fear, masculinity, hierarchy, or the violence of the hunt by reversing the roles. And perhaps sometimes they were simply nonsense, visual mischief, drawings made without any intention of being explained centuries later.

That uncertainty is exactly what draws me in.

I have always been interested in images that live in the overlooked corners of history, where humour, ambiguity, and disrespect meet. These marginal figures often feel closer to real human impulses than grand official images do. They are playful, unstable, slightly rude, and deeply human. They remind us that even inside sacred books and formal systems, there was always room for interruption.

This particular rabbit came from that world, and when Jacob asked me to tattoo it, he made one very specific choice: he wanted it in red. That decision changed everything. The colour gave the figure a sharper presence. What might have remained only playful suddenly became more charged. Not evil, exactly, but alert. As if the joke had teeth.

Even though the image is hundreds of years old, it does not feel distant. It feels awake. Like it knows exactly what it is doing. There is a strange confidence in it, a wink across centuries, reminding us that humour, subversion, and contradiction have always been part of how people deal with the world.

That is what we tried to keep in the tattoo. Not an explanation, not a fixed meaning, but the presence of something mischievous and enduring. A small red rabbit from the margins of history, still refusing to behave.

Text by noTATTOO Berlin.

References:

jorge cruz
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