Two black fine line outline tattoos on skin: a fox on the left and a stag's head with large antlers on the right, each with script wording below.

Fox and stag outline tattoos

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two matching outline tattoos sit side by side on skin. A fox is drawn on the left and a stag's head with large branching antlers is on the right, each shown in simple single-line contours with no shading. Thin cursive script reading 'always' and 'protego' follows the lower edge of each animal, and the photo is taken straight on with soft, even light.

Fine line Lettering Other Fox Stag Antler Script Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stag had been gone three nights when the fox came back up the towpath, fur matted with silt and one ear torn at the tip. He sat on the lock gate and waited, as he always did, until the lamp in the keeper's cottage went out and the water settled into its black, patient sheet.

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Nell Garrow found them at first light. The stag was lying in the reeds below the weir with his antlers snagged in a tangle of old wire that someone had strung across the sluice years before and forgotten. His flanks rose and fell slowly, and the fox stood on the bank with his muzzle level with the great brown head, not barking, only looking. Nell knelt in the cold grass and worked the wire loose with her knife and bare hands, talking low the way her father had talked to skittish horses. Her palms bled. She did not notice until later.

When the stag finally heaved himself up onto the towpath, shaking water from his coat, the fox trotted once around him in a tight circle and sat down at his shoulder. Nell had heard the old word from the tinker's girl when they were children, a thing shouted across the fields to turn away storms and bad luck. She said it now, half as a joke, and the fox's ear swivelled towards her as if she had called him by name.

They walked off together into the grey morning, stag first, fox close at his heel. By the time the sun cleared the poplars the reeds had closed behind them, and there was nothing left on the path but two sets of prints, one much smaller than the other, pressed side by side into the mud.