Black line drawing design of a fox curled around a heart, surrounded by blossom and falling petals, with a circle behind the fox's head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox curled around a heart with blossom

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing on paper shows a fox with its head turned, curled around a heart with a ribbon-like band and an oval pendant or locket shape. Cherry blossom flowers, leaves and falling petals frame the heart and fox, with a plain circle behind the fox's head. The linework is bold and even with hatched shading on the heart and tail, and the design is composed to fill a rounded area.

Botanical Neo-trad Fox Heart Blossom Flower Petal Leaves Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cherry trees had already dropped half their blossom by the time I stole the locket, and the wind kept picking petals off the track and tossing them into my fur, as if the valley meant to dress me for a funeral. I had come down from the ridge for one thing only: the small silver oval the potter's daughter wore on a cord, which she had been turning between her fingers at the well every morning that spring while she waited for a letter that never came.

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Foxes are supposed to want rice, or hens, or the gold a magistrate hides under his floorboards. I wanted the locket because it held a second heart folded inside the first, a curl of hair from a man who had gone west to the coast and drowned. I know this because I looked. I looked for three nights, perched on the roof beam above her father's kiln, working the catch open with one paw until it finally gave.

On the fourth night I carried it back. I could not have told you why, except that a fox who keeps a heart has nothing left to do but guard it, and I had grown tired of guarding. I laid it on the well's stone lip, under a fan of petals, and sat in the round light of the moon where she could see me from the gate.

She came out with a lamp and stopped. Then she laughed, once, the way people do when something small has frightened them and turned out to be harmless. She picked up the locket, closed her hand around it, and said to the empty lane as much as to me that the sea had kept its share and she would not grieve over the rest. I went back up the ridge with a petal caught in my ear, and it was still there when the first snow came.