Fine line black outline tattoo of a fox curled into a heart shape on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Fox curled into a heart on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small fox in profile is drawn as a single outline, with its body curled so that the overall silhouette forms a heart. Inside the outline, a few small dots mark the tail and haunch, and a short line shows the eye. The linework is clean and even in black ink, set against plain skin on a blue fabric background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has given up on the margins of the psalter, and you are the one who finds him at it with a pot of ink gone thick in the cold. 'The fox is wrong,' he says, not looking up. 'Look at the tail. It should be sleeping, not sulking.'

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You take the pen from his hand because your fingers are steadier, and because the abbot wants the Gospel of John finished before the thaw. Outside, the bell for Vigils has already rung and the cloister smells of wet wool. The fox is meant to be a small thing in the lower corner, a joke for whoever turns the leaf. Anselm wanted it curled, nose to tail, so that its back made the shape of a heart. He could never get the haunch right. Every time he drew it, the body unfolded into something a hunter would recognise.

So you stop trying to draw a fox that sleeps and draw one that is listening. You keep the line single and unbroken, going round the ears, down the flank, around the tail and back to the nose, never lifting the pen. When it closes, the shape sits in the margin as though it had always been there. Anselm leans over your shoulder, breathes out, and laughs the way he only does when the work has got away from him.

He dies before the thaw. The psalter goes to a house in Lincoln, and years later you hear that a merchant's clerk, idly turning its pages, stopped at that corner and asked who had drawn the little fox that loved its own tail.

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