Black and grey tattoo of a fox wearing a rosemary wreath on the forearm, shown in three side-by-side photographs.

Fox and rosemary wreath on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fox sits upright with its head raised, framed by a curved wreath of rosemary sprigs above its ears. The fur is built from fine, feathered black strokes and soft grey shading on the face and chest, while the long body and bushy tail are drawn with more open outlines. The image is three side-by-side photographs of the same forearm, all in black and grey with a plain skin-toned background.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Fox Wreath Sprig Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came aboard at Skerrow with the last of the ice, sitting on the coiled warp as if it had paid for its passage. You were hauling the second net when you saw it, and you swore, because nothing good ever came of a fox on a boat that nobody had fed. Old Dunne said foxes ran ahead of a bad season. He said it again when the gulls turned inland.

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It kept to the wheelhouse roof through the North Sea nights, its brush of a tail hanging over the rail like a dropped rope. Every morning you found a sprig of rosemary tucked beneath the bait tub, cut clean, the way the cook's wife grew it in pots on her step. Nobody claimed to have brought it. Dunne wouldn't have it in the galley, said the smell made the herring soft, but he never once threw a sprig over the side.

The turn came in March, on a grey morning when the swell lifted the boat three times before the engine caught. The fox stood on the gunwale with its ears flat, looking north. You understood only later that it had been waiting for the skipper to turn for home, and that it had known what the sea was about to take. The green crown on its head had gone dark with spray, and it never looked back at the water.

Skerrow still sells rosemary by the bunch at the Thursday market. You buy a bundle for the step of the cottage, and sometimes, when the tide is out and the boats sit on their keels, a red shape goes skirting along the harbour wall at dusk. Nobody on the quay mentions it. You hang a sprig by the door and leave the back gate open.