Black flash sheet of two fox silhouettes, paw prints, bird footprints and animal tracks, with a mirrored quotation in small script.

Fox and animal track flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A black-ink flash sheet arranged on a white background, showing two fox silhouettes with a scatter of paw prints, hoofed and clawed footprints, and bird tracks. Some fine branching lines and a mirrored line of small italic text sit between the motifs. The solid silhouettes and simple outlines are shown in one colour with no shading.

Fox Paw print Footprint Branches Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has pulled back past the slipway at Porthalloway and you are kneeling on the grey silt with your sleeves rolled, because Mrs Eades swore the fox had been at her fish boxes again and wanted to know which way it went. You do not need to ask. The prints run down the mud in a loose line, four toes and a pad, then a long stride where it cleared the rusted chain, then nothing at all where the water had licked the edge clean.

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Around them the gulls have been walking in neat three-toed arrows, each with a stub of hind claw pressed behind, and further along a dog has left a scatter of round pads that overlap like dropped coins. You learned to tell them apart the winter you were nine, when your father set you on the flats with a biscuit tin of plaster casts and a notebook. He used to say a track is only a sentence somebody forgot to finish.

The fox's line doubles back up the harbour wall toward the chandlery, where someone has scratched a message into the wet silt beside the step with a bent umbrella spoke. The letters run backwards, so you have to read them in the shine of a puddle: Come up before the tide turns. You look at the water. It is already moving back in, a thin silver hem creeping over the ribs of sand.

You stand, brush your knees, and climb the wall in your own prints, careful to step where the fox stepped. Behind you the sea smooths everything flat, the gulls, the dog, the fox, the words, until by the time you reach the top the harbour has erased all of it except the one set of prints you were careless enough to leave.