Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a curled sleeping fox with a cub inside its coil, framed by anemone-style flowers and leaves on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curled fox and flowers on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A fox curls around a smaller sleeping fox cub, with its head resting near its tail. Flowers, leaves and small berry clusters form a loose frame around the upper and lower edges of the design. The animals are built from fine outlines and dense stippled dotwork shading in black ink on grey skin, with the flowers and leaves rendered in the same monochrome palette.

Dotwork Botanical Calf Fox Flower Leaves Berry Anemone

Find an artist for this

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

Dear Tomas, the vixen came back to the keep again last night, and this time she brought her cub. I watched from the gap where the chapel wall gave way, the same gap you used to climb through to dare me across the nave. She has made her bed in the nook under the broken arch, where the windflowers have come up thick as bread crusts and the rowan drops its red beads on the flags.

Keep reading

She lies in a tight round, nose tucked to her tail, and the cub sleeps in the hollow of her curl with its muzzle tucked under her brush like a child with a hem for a pillow. Her ears stay up even in sleep. I counted the cub's breaths against the rain for an hour before I thought to fetch the lantern. Mr Hallam's men are due Monday with their barrows for the new road, and the arch is first on their list. I told him there was nothing left up there but jackdaws. He laughed and said the foxes would find another ruin.

I have not told him about the cub. I have left the sack of broken stone where it was, and the flat slab Father used as a step is still propped against the wall where the vixen can reach it. If the men come on Monday, they will have to lift their barrows over a pile of rubble and a tangle of wild anemone, and perhaps they will decide the road can bend. Write when you can. Tell me what the sea looks like from the deck, and whether you still count the waves the way you counted my stones.