Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a curled fox, pine trees, a lake and snowy peaks under a crescent moon, framed by a botanical wreath on a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and mountain scene on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A curled fox rests in the lower half of a circular scene, with pine trees, a lake with horizontal water lines, and two snow-capped peaks beneath a crescent moon and small stars. The fox and landscape are outlined in bold black linework, with stippled dot shading on the mountains, the fox's coat and the sky. The circle is framed by leaves and flowers on either side, and the piece is entirely black ink in greys on pale skin.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Fox Mountain Pine tree Lake Crescent moon Star Leaves Flower Wreath Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stove, you lot, and pass that heel of bread down before it goes cold. Now, the winter the Pass shut early, when the snow came over the shoulder of the Old Sister like milk poured off a spoon, there was a ferryman's girl called Ysolde who ran the lantern-hut at the lake's head. She kept a ledger of every traveller who came off the road, and she wrote the names in charcoal because ink froze in the pot. One night a stranger knocked with a dead man's coat on his back and no name at all to give her.

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She did not ask him for one. She asked him instead what the water was doing, for the lake had gone still and quiet, which meant the ice was thinking about it. He said the water had gone flat as a slate under a stone, and she laughed, because that was how her mother had always told her to read it. So they sat by the hearth with the moon hanging over the peaks like a paring dropped from a knife, and the stars came out so thick you could hear them tick, and she told him how the fox came down each night to sleep curled in the reeds below the hut, nose to tail, a ring of red in the white.

In the morning the stranger was gone, but his coat had been left folded on the bench, and in its pocket was a ledger of his own, written in the same charcoal. Ysolde turned to the last page and found her name, then beneath it a short line in a hand she did not know: the ice will hold until the fox wakes. She went down to the shore and saw the fox asleep at the water's edge, tail wrapped round its face, and she understood that the lake was not going to freeze that year after all. Pass the bread, now. That is the tale.