Red line drawing of a fox head framed by ornamental flowers and filigree, a tattoo design sketched on tracing paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox head with floral ornament sketch

Fine line · Colour · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical fox head facing forward, with pointed ears, detailed eyes and a patterned face outlined in fine red strokes. Blossoms and leaves sit on either side of the head and below the chin, with a small teardrop-shaped motif at the bottom. The lines are thin and even, drawn in red on a pale translucent sheet with no shading or colour fill.

Fine line Botanical Fox Flower Blossom Leaves Ornament Filigree Ear Eye Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top came down in Salford on a Tuesday, and by Thursday the lorries had gone, leaving you with the wagon, a tin of vermilion, and a sheet of tracing tissue that still smells of Ada's cigarettes. Nobody else wants the wagon. The man from the scrapyard in Wigan has already chalked a price on its side, and he is coming back on Saturday with men who do not care what used to be painted there.

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So you kneel on the cold boards with the lamp angled low and do what she taught you. You lay the tissue over the left panel, where the fox looks out from between two blossoms, and you follow every line with the red pencil: the pointed ears, the stiff whiskers, the little filigree at the throat like lace left out in the rain. Ada called it the lying-down method. Trace it first, she said, and then nobody can paint over the thing you love without noticing it has gone.

Your hand is slower than hers was. Twice you lift the pencil and wait, listening to the wind push at the canvas somewhere behind the depot fence, and twice you return to the fox's left eye because you cannot remember whether she curved the lashes up or down. Up, you decide. Ada never did anything the sensible way.

By midnight the tissue is covered from edge to edge, and the fox sits pale and exact on the paper, every ornament intact, every petal in place. You fold it once, then again, and slide it inside your coat. On Saturday the scrapper will get a wagon with nothing on its doors but dust. You will keep the fox, and a sheet of paper that still remembers how to be a whole animal.