Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a fox head with a dagger driven through it, placed centrally on the chest.

Fox head pierced by a dagger on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A fox head faces forward, with pointed ears, narrow eyes and a dark nose, and a dagger runs vertically through the head from the top of the image to the tip of the snout. The fox is built from fine stippled dots that create soft shading across the fur, while the dagger has solid black fills and crisp edges. The design sits centrally on the chest of a pale skin tone, with the blade and hilt filling the upper and lower parts of the frame.

Dotwork Chest Fox Dagger Animal Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had taken eleven hens from the mill at Corran Vale before anyone thought to ask what it wanted. The miller's daughter, Maud, was the one who asked. She sat on the wet step with a lantern guttering beside her, because she had tried every trap in the valley and the fox had walked around each one like a magistrate inspecting a bad road.

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It answered the way foxes answer in the old country, by looking at her until she understood. It wanted the iron dagger that hung above the mill door, the one her grandfather had used to cut the first groove in the millstone. Maud said that dagger was the mill's luck. The fox said the mill had enough luck already, and that the hens were the last of the winter. She had never heard a fox speak and did not stop to wonder at it.

She took the blade down. It was heavier than she remembered and cold through the cloth. The fox lowered its head and stood still, ears flat, the way a man waits for a tithe collector. "Put it through the crown of my head," it said, "and I will guard this yard until the mill falls down." Maud's hands shook, but she did it, and the fox did not bleed or cry out. It only went grey and still, its eyes gone pale as frost, and the dagger stood fixed above the door like a nail in a lintel.

Next morning the hens were all there, counted twice. The fox was never seen again, but every winter after, the miller hung his lamp from the dagger's hilt, and no hen in Corran Vale was ever taken by anything with teeth. Maud kept the mill, and the mill kept her, and nobody asked her again what the fox had been.