Fox and red flowers on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A fox head faces left in profile, with orange-red fur, a white muzzle and yellow eyes, framed by dark ears and a black paw at the lower edge. Red five-petalled flowers with black centres and green leaves wrap around the design against a teal background. Bold black outlines and solid, saturated fills give the piece a classic colour look, and the composition fills the curve of the upper arm.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Fox Flower Leaves Paw Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I kept the physic garden at Saint Hild's for eleven winters before the vixen taught me anything. She arrived in the thaw, sat under the south wall where the briar roses grew, and watched me dig with eyes the colour of old brass. I threw clods at her. I rang the little hand bell. She licked the white fur on her chest and waited, as if I were the one who had come calling.

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By Lent she had taken a rabbit from the bean rows, and in the morning frost I found her black paw prints stitched across the comfrey beds, neat as a scribe's stops. I took my grievance to Prior Gregory, who laughed until he had to sit down on the mounting block. The fox, he said, had lived at Saint Hild's since before the first stone of the church was laid, and the Rule bade us receive every guest as Christ. Besides, he added, wiping his eyes, she had no rule to break.

So I stopped chasing her. I left the heels of my bread at the wall, and the thinnings of chervil the infirmary never used, and I stopped locking the gate after compline. In return she left me things: a wood pigeon's wing, a snail shell, once a silver ring I never learned the owner of. I hung the ring on the gatepost for a month in case anyone came asking.

The briars came into flower in June, five red petals to each bloom with a black heart at the centre, and the vixen lay among them through the long afternoons with her chin on her forepaws. I used to think I was the keeper of that garden. By midsummer I had stopped being sure which of us was keeping the other.