Dotwork and linework tattoo of a sitting fox with its tail curled, framed by wheat stalks, leaves and red flowers in a circle, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox and wreath on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A fox sits upright with its head turned and its bushy tail curled beneath it, drawn in fine black outline with stippled dotwork shading across the body. Wheat stalks, leafy sprigs and small red flowers with red berries form a circular wreath around the animal. The black and grey shading is contrasted by small areas of red ink on the flowers and berries, and the design is centred on the upper back.

Dotwork Botanical Back Fox Wheat Flower Berry Leaves Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last sheaf was still standing when the fox first came to the edge of Cwm Farm's top field, sitting upright in the stubble with its head turned as if it were listening for the thresher a mile off. Dafydd Price had lost six hens to foxes that spring and wanted the thing dead, and he said so at supper, loudly enough that Mari, the hired girl, pretended not to hear.

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Mari did not argue with him. Every evening after that she walked up the lane with a tin bowl and left it on the gatepost: rowan berries, a few sprigs of bramble leaf, once a single late poppy she had no business picking. In the morning the bowl was always empty and the hens were always counted. Dafydd took this for luck and then for something he could not name, and he stopped mentioning the gun.

The first hard frost came early that year. Mari found the fox waiting by the gate, its tail curled round its feet, and the bowl at its side had been licked clean. Beyond it the field was bare, the sheaves carted, and the wheat stalks lay in a long pale ring where the cutting had gone round in circles.

In March Dafydd went up to mend the gate and found a wreath of dried wheat and bramble woven through the bars, no bigger than a dinner plate. He did not know who had made it. He hung it on the nail above the door and left it there, and the hens went on laying, and no fox ever came near them again.