Black and grey tattoo of a curled fox within a wreath of roses and foliage, with a tree trunk above, on a person's ankle and foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Curled fox in a rose wreath on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A curled fox rests inside a circular wreath of leaves and roses, with a tree trunk running down from the top edge of the design and a small bird or leaf nearby. The work combines fine outline with dense stippled dotwork shading to give the fur and foliage texture. The design is rendered only in black and grey ink and is shown against pale skin and a patterned cloth background.

Botanical Dotwork Ankle Fox Rose Wreath Tree Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came up the cliff path in the second week of November, when the wind had swung round to the west and the gulls had gone inland. I found her first in the rose bushes my wife planted against the boundary wall before she died, bushes that had never flowered for anyone else. She had curled herself into a hollow between the roots of the old sycamore, nose tucked under her tail, neat as a fist.

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I should have shot her off, or at least told the Trinity House man when he came out on the boat with the oil. But the hollow was dry and the sycamore broke the worst of the spray, and when I set down a saucer of scraps she opened one eye, looked at me the way Margaret used to look at a sum I had got wrong, and went back to sleep. After that I left the saucer at the foot of the trunk each evening, then carried the paraffin up the spiral stairs past the salt-blind windows.

The storm came on the night the north fence went. I climbed the tower with the wick guttering and found her in the lantern room, pressed against the warm brass housing of the lamp as though the light were a hearth. I did not move her. I sat on the iron step with the rain drumming on the glass and watched the beam sweep out over the water, and every time it passed over her she blinked and turned her face toward it.

In the morning the sea lay flat and grey. The saucer was empty, the hollow under the sycamore was empty, and against the wall a single white rose had opened, the first in eleven years. I cut it and put it in a jam jar on the sill of the tower, where it stayed until the petals went brown, and I have kept the lamp burning every night since.