Black and grey botanical tattoo of a running fox with poppies, thistles and ferns across the outer thigh and hip.

Fox and poppies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A running fox fills the centre of the design, surrounded by poppies, thistle-like blooms, ferns and leaves. The linework is fine and the shading is built up with stippling and dense hatching, giving the fox and foliage a detailed, etched look. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the design wraps across the hip and down the outer thigh, with a patterned skirt and a hand visible at the edge of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Fox Poppy Thistle Fern Leaves Flower Foliage Seed pod

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The innkeeper's wife at Hollin Gate kept one shutter open all winter, and nobody in the valley asked her why. When the snow shut the pass, travellers came down off the moor with frost in their beards and sat by her fire, and she fed them barley broth and never asked where they were going. The fox came to the back step on the third night of what people called a thaw, though it was only a lull between storms.

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It was a red fox, thin as a rake, with its ribs showing and one forefoot black with cold. It did not beg. It lay down in the corner of the store where she kept the dried seed heads from summer, and it watched her with the patience of an animal that had been running a long way. She knew what it wanted before it wanted anything. A fox only comes to a house when the house has something to lose.

A man came in at dusk with a hound-leash over his shoulder and a purse heavy with silver from the lord's bailiff. The bailiff wanted a fox skin for a collar, and this man had been told the Hollin Gate fox was the one. She gave him the good chair and the last of the ale. While he drank, she crushed poppy heads in the mortar and stirred the dust into his cup, as her mother had taught her for toothache and for bad dreams. He slept like a stone. In the yard the fox's tracks went round the well three times, then turned toward the ferns under the fell wall and were lost in the drift.

In spring the bailiff's purse turned up in a ditch on the far side of the river, full of thistle down and nothing else. The innkeeper's wife kept her shutter open through the summer. By midsummer there were poppies climbing the back wall, and a red fox asleep in their shade, and nobody in the valley asked her why.