Sketch-style fox head with orange watercolour splashes and a drawn tape deck with red dots, tattooed along the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox head and tape deck on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A fox head in loose black sketch linework dominates the upper side of the torso, with its snout angled down towards the hip. Orange and red watercolour washes bleed behind the fox, and a drawn cassette or tape deck with red dots sits below it. The photo is a side view cropped at the chest and hips, showing the tattoo across the ribs on a light skin tone.

Ribs Fox Watercolour splash Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you'll want to sit close to the stove for this, because the frost came down off the Cheviot before the milk was in and it has not thought better of it since. Old Mrs Tennant kept a cassette machine on the kitchen dresser, a grey box with two red dots on its face that she bought from the Co-op in Alnwick the year the Ferguson boys went off to Canada. She recorded everything onto it: the wind in the byre, the ewes complaining, the tractor that would not start.

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Then the fox came. Every winter a red one came down off the hill to take the hens, and every winter Mrs Tennant left the back door open a crack with a dish of cold potato on the step, because she said a thief who has been fed will steal politely. That December the fox stopped at the step and did not eat. It sat with its snout low and watched the window, where the orange light from the stove ran out across the yard in long blurred streaks, like paint bleeding into wet paper.

She pressed record and talked to it. She told it about her mother, who had kept hens the same way, and about the night in 1963 when the river took the old bridge at Coldstream. Her voice went onto the tape in its slow rise and fall. The fox listened with its ears laid back, the way a dog listens to a name it half remembers. When she finished she rewound the tape and played it back, and the fox was still there, and the hens were quiet.

In spring the machine sat silent on the dresser, but the step was never bare again. Whoever found the box afterwards, a lodger, a grandson, somebody with no ear for old voices, pressed play once and heard only a long hiss. Then, under the hiss, very faint, a woman telling a fox that the winter would pass, if you let it.