Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a fox face with an owl and a full moon above and peacock feathers below, on a lower leg.

Fox and owl with moon on calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large fox face fills the centre of the design, with an owl's wings and eyes overlaying its upper head and a full moon above. Bold outlines, smooth colour fills and fine feather shading create the detail, with peacock feathers and a red drop motif framing the lower section. Strong orange, teal and cream tones dominate the composition, which runs vertically along the leg.

Neo-trad Calf Fox Owl Moon Peacock feather

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and keep your sticky hands out of the toffee apples until I've finished. Right. You want the one about the fox who borrowed an owl's eyes. Every fairground has a fox in it somewhere, rust-coloured and sly, slipping between the generator lorries when the men are at their tea.

Keep reading

This fox was called Ambrose Rudd, and he had the bad habit of wanting to see everything at once. One October night, with the big wheel stopped and the moon hanging over the car park like a penny somebody had dropped, he climbed the tent pole to where Mrs Hoole the owl kept her perch. She was dozing with her head turned round backwards, as owls do, so he woke her by sneezing into her tail feathers.

Give me your eyes, he said, and I'll give you the last sausage roll from the burger van. She laughed, a soft and ugly sound, and said eyes are not for lending, but she would sell him one night of them for a peacock feather from the coconut shy. So he fetched one, and she set her eyes into his face, and oh, the things he saw. The ringmaster's lies, the moths gathering at the bulbs, every star over Shropshire, and the sad clown counting out his change with his lips moving.

Dawn came up grey and he had to give them back. Mrs Hoole took her eyes home, muttering, and left him a single feather for his trouble. He found he could no longer tell which way the wind was blowing by looking for it, only by lifting his nose, and he liked that well enough. Look there, behind his ear, see the teal of it? He keeps it still. And that is why, when the wheel stops and the moon hangs low, he still comes slinking back to sniff the candyfloss, pretending he has never once been up in the sky.