Black and white flash sheet of tattoo designs on a phone case, including a fox head, compass, bird, spider webs, playing card suits and a rope knot.

Black ink flash sheet with spider webs, compass and fox

Black and grey · Flash

A white background is filled with loose black ink flash drawings of tattoo designs, including a fox head beside a heart, a pocket compass, a perched bird, a horseshoe and a rope knot. Smaller motifs such as spider webs, Pac-Man, a ghost, playing card suits, a paper plane and a bomb are scattered around, with handwritten phrases like The Rogue and Far Away. The linework is sketchy and uneven, with solid black areas and no colour, and the layout is packed edge to edge like a sheet of designs.

Fox Compass Bird Horseshoe Rope Heart Spider web Ghost Playing card Paper plane Horse Lettering Star Tally marks

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's only just decided to be a fire. You'll want the Far Away tale, the one nobody tells at the Michaelmas fair because it ends with a fox owing money. Harrow and Vane's Travelling Marvels had three elephants fewer than its posters claimed by the autumn it went under, and the big top leaked over the trapeze so the aerialists practised in their socks. Nobody wanted to be the last to leave, so they played cards in the wagon every night to pretend the takings were still coming in.

Keep reading

The Rogue was a fox nobody had bought. He came in a crate with a brass pocket compass that wouldn't stop pointing at the word HOME stamped round its rim, and he had a habit of lifting things. Cards, rings, the ringmaster's pocket watch. Every morning he left one thing on the tailboard: a folded paper aeroplane with a question written on one wing. Where are we going? Nobody could read his handwriting, but Mabel could, and she never told anyone what the answer was.

On the last night the rope the flyers used was knotted in a figure of eight, and the parrot had been counting the days on the wagon wall in tallies since spring. The fox sat in the sawdust and waited for the needle to settle. It swung, shivered, and came to rest on the fox's own nose, which Mabel said was the only honest thing that compass ever did. So they packed the cards, folded the tent around the rain, and walked after him down the lane, and the bird called out the stops all the way to the sea.