Small colour tattoo of a red fox beside dark leafy branches on the inner wrist, drawn in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and leafy branch on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small red fox with a white chest sits beside a sprig of dark brown leaves. The fox is filled with flat orange-red ink and its outline is thin and clean, while the leaves are drawn in fine dark linework with little shading. The tattoo sits off-centre on the inner wrist against plain pale skin, with a second hand pressed into the frame on the right.

Fine line Forearm Fox Leaves Branch Animal Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came down from Harrow Edge the week the thaw broke, and Edith Cole, who kept the bakehouse at the foot of Fell Lane, saw it first because she was the only soul in Thornby up before the milk cart. It sat on her back step with its tail wrapped round its feet and watched her knead. She tossed it the burnt heel of a loaf, and it ate with the neatness of a clerk, then went away up the lane without a backward look.

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It came every morning after that. Walter, her husband, said foxes did not come back for bread and that she was feeding the parish's rats. One morning in February there was a sprig on the step instead, a stem of ash with its dark leaves still wet, laid square across the threshold like a card left at a door. Edith put it in a jar of water on the sill. Walter laughed at it. Nothing in that jar wilted, not through the rest of the month.

Then the snow came over the tops and cut Thornby off for nine days, and Walter's chest went bad. The doctor could not climb up from Kirkby. On the tenth morning the fox was on the step again with a longer branch in its mouth. When Edith opened the door it turned and trotted up the lane, stopping every few yards to look back. She followed it through the drifts to the beck, where a single ash leaned over the water with a bare trunk and no leaves at all. The fox sat beneath it and waited.

She broke a twig from the dead tree, and the fox took it and walked home ahead of her. Walter was sitting up by the fire when she got in, and the jar on the sill held a green sprig that smelled of rain. Come spring she found the fox asleep on the step and the jar holding one leaf. She planted it behind the bakehouse and went in to start the bread.