Black ink pen drawing of a fox-masked figure surrounded by peonies, a woman's face and an oni face, designed as a Japanese-style tattoo sketch with no body part shown.

Fox mask figure with peonies and oni face sketch

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a fox-masked figure in a flowing robe, with peony and camellia blooms rising above and a woman's face and a horned oni face to the right. Fine pen linework and dense patterned hatching fill the robe, hair and surrounding waves, with the flat paper left largely bare. It is in black ink only, with no colour, and the composition fills a tall vertical format.

Japanese Fine line Peony Woman Wave Ribbon Bead Sword

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is only so bright, and the guards at the bridge are not interested in old men who talk. So. The fox had been crossing the river at Hollin Ford for three hundred years, and every time she came over she left something on the far bank. A peony the first spring, a camellia the second, and so on, until the mudflats there bloomed like a stolen garden.

Keep reading

The toll-keeper that year was a woman called Sumi Vane, who kept a ledger and a bad temper. She wanted the fox's papers. The fox gave her a mask instead, white as boiled rice, with its ears pointing at the sky. Sumi turned it over and found a face under the paint that was not a fox's at all, but a woman's, and under that again a horned thing grinning with its teeth filed flat.

"Which one is coming through?" Sumi asked.

"All three," said the fox, "and they have been arguing about the fare since Tuesday."

The waves came up the bank then, curling like ribbon, and Sumi, who had not wept in twenty years, found the ledger suddenly wet. She stamped the page. The fox walked over the water without wetting her feet, dropped one last camellia on the boards, and was gone into the reeds. Sumi kept the mask. It is still in the customs house, if you want to see it, though you will have to pay the fare.