Orange and yellow fox design drawn in a circular frame of swirling linework, shown as a finished drawing and mid-drawing with a pen on a warm background.

Fox design in a swirling floral frame

Colour · Flash

The top panel shows a hand using a fine pen to draw two fox heads with stylised, flowing fur. The lower panel shows a finished circular design of a fox curled up, framed by ornate swirls and leaf-like curls. The linework is fine and flowing, shaded with warm orange, yellow and brown tones on a parchment-coloured background.

Fox Swirl Floral Leaves Hand Pen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had taken to sleeping in the airing cupboard by the second week of October, and Mrs Teague found me on my knees in the scullery with a fountain pen and a stack of spoiled breakfast menus. I had been drawing her. Not the fox herself, who would not hold still for anybody, but the ferns on the hallway wallpaper, which seemed to bend towards her whenever she slept, as if they wanted to hear what she was dreaming about.

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"Guests are not supposed to know what the cupboard holds," said Mrs Teague, but she sat down on the bottom stair anyway and watched me work. Outside, the sea came in grey over the breakwater and the gulls argued about the bins. We had four rooms let that month: a retired surveyor who complained about the damp, two sisters from Leeds who played cribbage until midnight, and a young man called Desmond who sketched the harbour every morning and never showed anyone his pages.

In November the agent came with his clipboard and his talk of foundations and sea walls. The house was to be sold to a firm that wanted flats. Mrs Teague wept quietly in the kitchen. I did not weep. I took the last clean sheet of the old ledger, thick cream paper that drank ink the way a biscuit drinks tea, and drew a ring of curling leaves, then the fox curled inside it with her tail tucked over her nose.

On the last morning I opened the airing cupboard for the removal men. It was empty except for a warm patch on the blanket. The fox had gone out under the back door, where the gap was never fixed, and we never saw her again. I pinned the drawing to the cupboard door and left it there, which is the nearest I have ever come to saying goodbye.