Colour tattoo of a sitting fox with black linework, red roses and green geometric triangles on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and roses on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A sitting fox in profile is drawn with loose black linework and filled with orange and black wash shading. Red roses sit at the lower right beside outlined and green-filled triangles, with faint outlines of a second fox and triangles on the left. The design sits on bare skin against a dark background, with the thigh filling most of the frame.

Botanical Geometric Thigh Fox Rose Triangle Fern Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, all of you, and mind the seed trays. My grandmother told this one in the years after the great drowning, when the rain still came in sheets over what was once the Severn, and she swore the fox was older than the wall that keeps the orchards. Listen. There was a vixen who would not be drawn in. The surveyors came up the valley with their triangles, three-sided and tidy, every field cut into shapes that could be counted, and they drove their stakes into the red earth where the roses grew wild along the lane.

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The vixen sat on the hill above the stakes and watched them. She did not run. She sat in profile, the way a fox sits when it has decided the world can wait, and her outline was never quite finished. Every time the surveyors traced her with their charcoal, the line wandered off the edge of the paper and came back somewhere else. The younger one, a girl named Ysolde Penhallow who carried the chain, grew cross about it. Her master told her to close the line. Ysolde said the fox would not close.

So one evening in the hungry month, when the ferns had gone gold, Ysolde climbed the hill with a basket of rose hips and sat down beside the animal. She did not draw her. She pressed a hip into the soil and waited. By dawn a rose had put a thorny stem through the chalk marks, and the triangles along the lane had sprouted green ferns in their corners, soft and unpaid for.

The surveyors went home that winter with empty charts. My grandmother said the fox still sits up there, and if you look at her long enough the lines start to wander toward you. Mind you do not trace her. Let her stay unfinished, love, that is how she keeps the field.