Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a standing fox beside a skull and pine trees within a circle, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and skull in a dotwork forest

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fox stands in the centre of a circular design, with pine trees on either side and a skull at its feet. The fox is built from fine linework and stippled dots, with shaded fur and a lighter patch on its chest. The design is in black ink and grey tones and fills the circle against the skin of the forearm.

Dotwork Forearm Fox Skull Pine tree Forest Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The skull had lain in the bracken since the first frost, and the fox had circled it for three nights before she decided it was no longer a danger. Bone did not bite. Bone did not set snares or follow a scent up the valley with a lantern. The man it had belonged to had done all of that, and had died among the pines with his boots still laced, and the trees had closed over his path the way trees do.

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On the fourth night she dragged out the brass buckle from his coat, which the rain had worked loose from the leaf litter, and dropped it into the hollow where his left eye had been. It rang faintly when the wind moved it. A vixen from the far slope came down the hill to see what the noise was, and stayed to listen with her ears flat and her tail wrapped tight.

"He would have had your pelt for that collar," the vixen said.

"He would have," said the fox. "So I am keeping his account instead. Every bright thing he took from this wood goes back into it, one at a time, until the ledger is empty."

The vixen went home before dawn. The fox stayed, curled in the frost beside the skull, and every time the wind came through the trees the buckle sang a little, thin and sweet, and the pines leaned in to hear it.