Black and grey fine line tattoo of a fox head in a diamond frame with dotwork shading, flowers and a tied ribbon, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and flowers in a diamond frame

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fox head sits inside a diamond-shaped frame, with its snout and pointed ears drawn in fine black linework. Stippled dots fill part of the background, and sprig-like flowers and a tied ribbon extend from the lower corner of the frame. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo shown in sharp detail against the skin.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Fox Animal head Flower Ribbon Bow Dot Frame Diamond

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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

The fox has been sitting on the kitchen step of Carrow Keep since before the roof came down, and the steward's daughter, Ilse, insists it is the same animal her grandmother fed bread crusts to. You have heard this at every wedding and wake in the valley and never once believed it, so when you climb the north stair with the lamp and find the wind has torn the lead from the chapel window, you are not surprised to see it there, pale-muzzled on the sill, watching you with the patience of something that owns the ground.

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Carrow was built for a lord who wanted a view and got a wall of wet stone instead. Its last lord lost the lands at cards and drowned himself in the mere, and the place has been a quarry for three generations since. Ivy holds the masonry together better than mortar. Bluebells come up through the flagstones in April, and by August the thistles have claimed the rest. Ilse says the fox keeps the mice out of the granary and the village children out of the cellars, and that a fox who wants you to leave will show you where the ground gives way.

It shows you the ground that night. It walks ahead of the lamp to the cellar arch, stops, looks back, and only goes on when you do. Below the arch the floor is sound, and tied to an iron ring with faded green ribbon you find a tin box of letters from a woman who once waited at a window that is now only a hole in the sky.

You tie the ribbon back the way you found it, leave the box where it sits, and walk out before the lamp gutters. The fox is on the step again when you turn round. It does not follow. It has never needed to.