Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a curled animal inside a circle with radiating stripes, on the outer upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curled animal in a circle on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black circle contains a curled animal, possibly a fox or cat, with its head tucked towards its tail. Radiating bands of black and grey fan out around the circle, creating a striped, sunburst-like background. A partly visible colour tattoo with red, orange and blue ornament sits at the bottom edge of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Animal Fox Circle Ray Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My grandmother kept the bakehouse at the edge of Hollin Wood, and every January she sent me out before dawn with a heel of bread for the fox that slept in the hollow beneath the stile. It lay curled so tightly that its nose touched its tail, a dark ball of fur in the frost. "Don't wake her," Gran said. "The sun is inside her, and if she stretches too early we get the dark back for another month."

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I didn't believe a word of it, being eleven and certain of most things. So one morning I crouched behind the drystone wall with the bread in my pocket and waited. The sky over the ploughed fields stayed grey as porridge, and my fingers went numb. Then the fox shifted, a single shiver running from ears to tail, and light began to leak out between her ribs in thin pale bands, fanning across the frosted grass until the whole hollow looked like the inside of a struck bell.

I should have run home. Instead I stepped over the wall and set the bread down, and the fox opened one eye, yellow as a candle flame, and looked at me the way Gran looked at a loaf that had risen wrong. She did not uncurl. She only pressed her nose a little deeper into her tail, and the bands of light dimmed, as if I had asked for something far too large.

I walked home with my face hot and told Gran nothing except that the bread had gone. She smiled into the flour. "She's clever, that one. She knows a child who can keep a secret." The next morning the sun came up over Hollin Wood right on time, and I took the long way round the stile every day after that, and let her keep the morning to herself.