Hand and wrist with a grey-blue fox tattoo on the back of the hand, an ice cream cone above the wrist and small symbols and script around them.

Fox and ice cream cone on a hand and wrist

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand held up against a dark teal background shows a fox standing on the back of the hand, with an ice cream cone with a face, a short line of script, an eye and several small symbols on the wrist and fingers. The linework is simple and slightly uneven, with mostly grey-blue ink and some areas of soft shading. The hand fills most of the frame, with the forearm leading up out of the top edge.

Hand Forearm Fox Eye Star Diamond Script Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox turned up at the slipway in the third week of August, when the ice cream van had been parked there so long the gulls treated it as furniture. Dilys Marr, who ran the van with her brother Tom and a tin of coins they never bothered to count, saw it first. It sat on the wet concrete, watching the serving hatch the way a clerk watches a clock.

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Tom wanted to shoo it off with a broom. Dilys made a cone instead, plain vanilla with a flake pushed in at a slant, and set it on the step. The fox ate the flake first, neatly, then the cream, and left the wafer folded like a sealed envelope. Every evening after that she made one more, and every morning there was a small grey stone on the step, smooth as a knuckle, with a pale mark on it like a shut eye.

By September Tom had stopped complaining and started keeping count. Forty-one stones lined the sill of the hatch. A boy from the caravan park asked whether the fox was a spirit, and Dilys said it was only hungry. She believed that until the night she found a stone with a star scratched into its face, the same star her mother had painted on the van door forty years before, when the van still belonged to someone else.

On the last night of the season the fox did not come. Dilys waited with the hatch open until the tide turned, then walked down to the slipway with a torch. The stones had been stacked into a low cairn, and on top sat an empty wafer, and beside it, pressed into the damp, a single print with four neat toes. She kept the van open one more week out of habit. The fox never came back, but she still makes every cone with a flake at the same slant, just in case.