Colour tattoo of a red fox with the words Breathe Out So I Can Breathe You In in ornate black script on the forearm, in a neo-traditional style.

Fox and lettering on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised red and orange fox sits in profile beside ornate black lettering that reads Breathe Out So I Can Breathe You In, with scrolls and flourishes around the text. The fox has bold dark outlines, with orange-red fill and grey shading on its body and a deep red tail. The tattoo is photographed straight on against a plain grey background, showing the full composition on the forearm.

Lettering Neo-trad Forearm Fox Lettering Script Scrollwork Flourish Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came over the ridge at Caddow just as the supper bell stopped, her red coat dark with frost and her tail dragging a line through the snow. My father had been watching her approach from the tower for an hour, a pocket watch open in one hand and a cup of cold tea in the other. Nobody else in Harrowmere would have trusted a fox with the king's post, but he had reared her from a runt pulled out of a snare, and he said a creature that knew hunger would never drop a letter.

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He taught me the trade the winter I turned eleven. Write small, he said, and fold tight, because the fox runs best with her chest free. On the long descent to the river she needed to let her breath go in one slow push before the hairpin bends, or the cold would catch in her lungs and she would stumble. So every courier's letter carried the same line in the margin, in his careful hand: breathe out, so I can breathe you in. The fox never learned to read it. I think he wrote it for himself.

The letter she brought that night was from my brother Aled, who had gone north with the garrison in the autumn and had not written since. It was short, as his letters always were, with no news except that the passes were open and the snow had stopped. Beneath the signature, in pencil, he had drawn a little spiral, the way he used to sign things when we were children and had nothing clever to say. My father read it twice and handed it to me without a word.

I rubbed the fox's ribs by the stove until her breathing eased. She leaned into my knees and let out one long sigh, and I felt my own chest loosen to match it. In the morning I would write back, folding the page small, and send her north again. Before I slept I wrote the margin line onto a strip of paper and tied it to her collar, in case the road ever made her forget.