Traditional style tattoo of a fox in a dark suit and red bow tie holding an envelope with a red heart seal, with a green leaf partly visible at the top left.

Fox in a suit holding an envelope

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

A fox wearing a dark suit, white shirt and red bow tie stands in a three-quarter view, holding a small envelope with a red heart seal and a dotted line trailing from it. The fox's head and ears are shaded in red and orange with bold black outlines, while the suit is rendered in solid black and grey shading. A partly visible green leaf sits in the top left corner of the frame.

Traditional Fox Suit Bow tie Envelope Heart Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marjorie, the ferry missed again on Tuesday, so the post has been piling up in the back room of the harbour office, and I have spent three evenings sorting it by candlelight because Mr Pell says lamp oil is for lighthouses and not for clerks. I mention this so you understand the state of things before I tell you about the envelope.

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It came up in the mainland sack with no stamp, only a red wax heart pressed into the flap and a line of tiny holes pricked along one edge, as if someone had stitched it shut and then thought better of it. The direction read: The Keeper's Cottage, Inish Caol, to be given into the hand of Ailsa Brodie. Ailsa has kept bees on that headland since before the war and has never once been called anything but Ailsa, so I walked it up myself in my good suit and the red bow tie you tied for me at the Christmas dance.

She read it standing in her doorway with the bees going round her head like a slow argument. It was dated 1961. Donald had posted it from Glasgow the week before he sailed, and it had been lost behind a crate of tinned peaches for sixty years until Mr Pell finally shifted the crate. He wrote that he would come back on the next tide, and that the heart was the only seal he had left, and she should keep it as a sign he was still coming.

Ailsa did not cry. She pressed the wax with her thumb, then handed me a jar of heather honey and asked if I would post a reply on Thursday's boat. I told her the boat has not run on Thursdays since spring. She said Donald never believed in timetables either. I have pinned the broken heart above my desk and started the reply myself, because somebody on this island ought to finish a sentence that was begun so long ago. Yours, Reynard.