Black and grey botanical tattoo of a bare tree whose roots curl into a circle of foliage and roses around two curled animals, placed on the ankle and lower calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bare tree and curled foxes on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare tree with thin, delicate branches climbs up the calf, and its roots sink into a rounded cluster of leaves, roses and two curled animals that appear to be foxes. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled shading in the foliage and softer grey tones on the animals. The design is in black ink on pale skin, and the circular cluster sits at the ankle while the trunk runs up the leg.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Ankle Calf Tree Bare tree Root Foliage Rose Fox Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash on Harrow Rise had given up its last leaf before the frost, and by Candlemas it stood on the bank like a wire drawn across the sky. Nobody in the village went near it after dark. Old Tom Lidgate said the roots went down further than the church did, and that something lived in the knot of them, warm as bread.

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Ruth Carver didn't believe him until the February she went up with a billhook to clear the brambles. Under the roots, in a hollow lined with dead rose hips and pink-edged moss, two foxes lay curled nose to tail, one greyer at the muzzle than the other. The vixen opened one eye, looked at Ruth the way a churchwarden looks at a late arrival, and closed it again.

Ruth went home and didn't sleep. Every morning after, she left a crust of heel bread on the stile and a saucer of milk on the flat stone, and every morning both were gone. In March the ash put out one small blossom, pale and folded, high on the topmost twig where no hand could reach. The vixen came up the bank with her tail low and stood beneath it, waiting.

Tom came up the lane that evening and found Ruth sitting on the stile with her boots in the mud. 'It's only the one flower,' she said. 'I think it's all the tree had left, and they've been keeping it warm.' He didn't argue. Above them the blossom shivered, let go, and came down slow as a moth onto the vixen's paw, and far beneath the roots something turned over in its sleep and sighed.