Two colourful sketch-style tattoos on the lower legs, a leaping red fox on the left and a flying bird with teal and pink splashes on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and songbird tattoos on two lower legs

Calf · Colour · Photo

A leaping fox in red, orange and pink sits on the left leg, with loose black linework and splattered ink trailing below it. On the right leg a bird with outstretched dark wings and a pink breast is set against teal and pink watercolour-style splashes. The ink is mostly coloured, with black used for sketchy outlines and feather detail, and the two pieces are shown side by side.

Calf Fox Bird Splatter Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paraffin lamp in the back passage had gone out again, so Dora felt her way along the coat hooks with a tray of gin glasses held against her chest. Beyond the swing doors the Saltcombe Pavilion band was murdering a foxtrot, and the sea wind rattled every tall pane as if it wanted in on the dancing.

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Her brother Eli had promised her a painting for the bar wall if she kept the lemonade cold through the summer season. He painted signs for the pier company and could make a gull look like it was about to shout at you. He had also sworn that the red fox which came in off the marsh each October was a real fox and not a ghost, and Dora had never decided which of them to believe.

The trouble started during the last waltz. A starling had got in through the broken fanlight and flung itself against the great window with a crack that stopped the fiddle mid-bar. Then the fox came out from under the stage, low and quick, red as a struck match, and went up the ballroom steps in three bounds. The bird dropped to the boards. Dora got there first.

She carried it outside, cupped in both hands, down the pier steps to the rail where the funfair lights sprayed teal and pink across the wet planks. Its heart fluttered against her palm. She opened her hands and it lifted, clumsy then certain, into the dark over the water. When she turned, the fox was sitting at the top of the steps with its tail curled round its feet, watching her as if she were the odd one out. It trotted off along the seawall towards the marsh, and the last she saw was a flick of orange in the grass.

Eli's painting went up behind the bar that winter: the fox in full stride, the bird wheeling above, and between them a spatter of ink running down the canvas like dropped petals. Customers asked who the artist was. Dora always said a friend.