Black and grey dotwork fox head with a rose and flowing leaves tattooed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox head with rose on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fox head in profile sits at the centre of the upper back, with a rose and long, flowing leaves tucked around its right side and a small cross-like mark above its brow. The fox's face is built from fine outlines filled with stippled dots for shading, while the rose and leaves use clean, solid linework. The image is in black and grey with a plain, pale skin background and the tattoo is the clear focus.

Dotwork Botanical Back Fox Rose Leaves Flower Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox was already on the bollard when Ada came down the slipway with the lantern, sitting upright the way a dog waits for its name. Nobody in Skerrow had seen it before the spring. It had a dark cross above its brow like a stitch someone had tried to unpick, and when the wind came round to the north it turned its whole head towards the open water and held still.

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Her son Davy was crewing the Brightwater that week, and he laughed at her for setting a rose in a jam jar on the stern thwart. 'For luck,' she said, and tied a strand of sea-bleached bindweed round the jar so it would not tip. The rose had come from the wall behind the chapel, the last bloom still open in October, and its petals darkened in the salt air long before they reached the Farnes.

Three hours out the sky turned the colour of wet slate. Davy shouted that the glass had dropped, and the skipper ordered the sails down, but the swell came from the wrong quarter and the boat began to slew towards the skerry. Through the spray Davy saw the fox standing on the rocks, its dark mane streaming behind it in long ropes, and it did not run. It turned its head left, then right, until he understood the gap in the reef it was showing him.

They came through the gap with the hull grinding and nobody spoke until the harbour wall rose up grey. The fox was gone. On the bollard lay a single rose petal, dry as paper, and Ada picked it up and slipped it into her pocket without telling anyone why she was smiling.