Colour tattoo of a crouching orange fox with a long bushy tail curling up the upper arm, shaded in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crouching fox on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A fox crouches low with its front legs forward and its long tail sweeping up and over the top of the design. The linework is bold and dark, with fur detail built up through orange, russet and grey shading. The composition runs vertically along the upper arm, with the fox's head at the lower end and the tail filling the upper section.

Neo-trad Upper arm Fox Animal Tail Fur

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't look at me like that, Tommy, I'm not finished. Where was I? The fox. He's on the harbour wall at Skerrow, the morning the boats came in short, and he's flat to the stones the way a cat goes flat before a sparrow, belly low, forepaws stretched out in front of him as if he means to bow to the water. Every gull on that wall knew him. None of them moved. The fox had a rule about gulls and the gulls had a rule about foxes, and between the two rules nobody in Skerrow got their dinner.

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Jessamy Crane mended nets on the quay, and she had lost three weeks of mackerel to that fox's cousins. So she sat on her upturned creel with her pipe going cold and watched him wait. His tail stood up behind him like a flag nobody had remembered to lower, rust at the root and smoke-grey at the tip, the colour the sea goes just before rain. She knew what he was waiting for. The bucket of gutted herring by the slipway, and the moon lying on its surface like a coin someone had dropped there.

He leapt, or he meant to. The moon broke into a hundred pieces as his nose went in, and he came up spitting brine with a whiting in his jaws that the bucket had never held. Jessamy laughed until she coughed. 'That's not yours,' she told him. He dropped the fish at her boots, looked at her with his pale eyes, and trotted off along the wall with his tail sweeping the stones behind him.

By the time the boats came round the point that evening, the fox was asleep on the coiled rope by her door, his tail drawn over his nose against the wind. She didn't wake him. You don't move a fox off a good coil of rope, and you don't sell a whiting that was given to you.