Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a fox head framed by blue flowers and a red rose, placed on the thigh.

Fox, blue flowers and red rose on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A fox head in profile sits above a large red rose with dark green leaves, with three blue five-petalled flowers set around the fox's ears and cheek. The fox is shaded in browns and orange with fine fur linework and a dark nose, while the rose uses bold black outlines and layered red petals. The design fills the frame on bare skin, with a pale background at the edges.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Fox Rose Flower Leaves Animal Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the gate, it sticks in wet weather, same as it did in my grandmother's day, and nobody wanted to mend it while the old king was still breathing down the lane. Right then. You want the fox, or the rose? Fox first. The fox was in the hedges long before anyone thought to wall a garden against him.

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In the valley of Mirrenwold, the king kept one rose behind grey stone. It had come over three mountains in a clay pot, red as a cut thumb, and the royal word was that anyone who plucked a petal would lose a hand. Brannoc the fox, who had never once believed a king's word, lay in the ditch below that wall every night and counted the blue flowers growing at its foot, five petals each, like coins he could not spend. His vixen was sick with the cold, and he had nothing to bring her but his own cleverness.

The gardener, Ysolde, caught him on a frosted morning with his nose through the gap under the gate. She did not call the guard. She sat down on the step, pulled her shawl tight, and asked what he would trade. He said he had a tongue sharp enough to talk a crow off a carcass. She laughed, which the king's men had not heard from her in years, and said the rose would drop its petals on its own before the month was out. Only the fallen ones were free, and the wind never carried them where anyone needed them.

So the fox learned to wait. Each dawn he gathered the petals the wind had left among the blue flowers and carried them to Ysolde's step, and she stitched them into a balm that warmed the vixen through the winter. The king never noticed the missing red. He only noticed that the rose grew fuller every spring, and when he asked the gardener why, she said, Some things come back the more they are given away. The fox, I am told, never once stole from that garden again. He was too busy being thanked.