Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a fox walking between tree trunks under a starry night sky, set in a circle on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox between trees in a dotwork circle

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fox walks left between tall tree trunks inside a circular frame, with a night sky of solid black panels dotted with white stars and a crescent moon above. The fox and trunks are drawn in fine lines and stipple, while the night sky is filled with solid black ink and the ground is shaded with dots. The image is shown in black and grey on pale skin, with the design centred and the rest of the arm cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Fox Tree Forest Night sky Star Moon Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had come through the ventilation grille again, and Ines knelt in the frost-bright soil of Orchard Four with her sleeve pushed up, trying to coax it out with a heel of rye bread. The ship's lamps had dimmed to their night setting an hour ago. Overhead, the hull panels showed the sky the founders had chosen for them, a black field pricked with white points and a moon the colour of old bone.

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The fox did not take the bread. It stood between two grey trunks of the cherry stand, the ones the botanists had grown from cuttings smuggled out of a dying planet, and watched her with the patience of something that had no notion of a ship at all. Ines had read the archive files. Foxes had been gone from the continent of her grandmother's birth for longer than anyone alive could mourn them. This one had arrived in a crate of soil from the last landing, a heavy vixen, and nobody had noticed until the litter was found in the compost bins.

Her supervisor, Dmitri, wanted them trapped and recycled. The air scrubbers were tight, and every animal ate. Ines had argued for a week, and the argument had become a kind of promise she was not sure she could keep. She laid the bread on the path and stepped back between the trunks.

When she looked again the fox was gone, and so was the bread, and in the soil by the cherry roots a row of small neat prints led back toward the grille. She did not report the vent that night. The sky above her stayed black and starred, and the moon, which she knew to be a painted lamp, hung exactly where it was always meant to.