Black ink tattoo on an upper arm showing a dark animal silhouette inside an oval with mushrooms, leaves and swirling linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Animal, mushrooms and leaves on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large oval design shows a dark animal silhouette with a lattice pattern, surrounded by mushrooms, leafy sprigs and flowing swirled lines. A pear-shaped motif hangs from the base of the design. The tattoo is in solid black ink with fine outlines and bold filled areas, shown against skin and a green top.

Blackwork Botanical Upper arm Animal Mushroom Leaves Swirl Lattice Oval Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came to the stile at Thornmere every October, on the night the mushrooms rose pale under the oaks. Nobody in the village kept hens after that, and nobody went past the old hazel gate without first saying good evening to the dark.

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Mab Tanner was eleven the year her mother's cough would not settle. Her mother sent her to the wood's edge for blewits and a bunch of rowan for the kettle, and Mab went with her boots unlaced and her heart in her mouth. On the stile she found a pear, bruised and sweet-smelling, set down as neatly as a coin on a counter. The fox sat beside it with its tail wrapped round its feet and watched her the way a neighbour watches a child who has been told to mind her manners.

It did not run when she came close. It rose, turned, and walked along the hedge, stopping at each ring of mushrooms so she could catch up. The trees opened into an orchard of grey trunks where the fruit hung low, and at its centre stood a cottage with no door, only a lattice of woven hazel where a door should be. Mab understood that she was meant to see it and not to enter, so she took one pear and left her mother's loaf on the stile in exchange.

In spring there was a pear tree at the bottom of the lane where there had only been nettles. Her mother, who had never cared for fruit, ate the first one standing beneath it, and the cough went quiet for good that summer. The fox was never seen again, but the stile was swept every October, and the bread was always gone by morning.