Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox, bird and rose tattoo

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Photo

A fox head in profile sits at the centre of the design, with a small bird perched on a leafy branch above it. Leaves and a rose with open petals fill the lower and left areas. The work uses bold dark outlines with fine hatching and light grey shading on the fox and the foliage, with no colour ink.

Neo-trad Botanical Fox Bird Leaves Branch Rose Flower Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rose had been planted the spring the vixen came down off Harbottle Fell with a torn ear and a pheasant feather tucked in her collar. Nobody in the dale would give her a henhouse, so she made a garden instead, clawing bramble and nettle away from the old wall until a single red bush stood flat against the stones. The wren who lived in the ash tree took to scolding her every morning.

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The wren was called Mab by the shepherd's boy, who fed her crumbs from the sill. She told the fox the roses would not last past Michaelmas, that the wind off the north side was too cold, that a garden made of borrowed things always ends in a hole under a hedge. The fox ignored her for three summers. She dug, she mulched with rotted hay from the byre, and in the evenings she sat with her chin on her paws watching the petals open one at a time like folded letters.

In the fourth autumn the boy came up the lane with a gun and a barking dog, and the fox ran for the fell and left the rose unguarded. When she crept back at dusk the bush was still there, roots and all, though someone had dug a neat square round it and packed the hole with flints. Mab sat on the highest branch of the ash, and for once she said nothing at all.

The fox lay down among the leaves. After a while the wren hopped down the branch and settled on her back, and they stayed there until the frost came, the rose between them, both of them stubborn as the wall.