Coloured flash drawing of a fox resting on a crescent moon with green leaves and small flowers, drawn in a fine line style with soft watercolour shading.

Fox on a crescent moon with flowers

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A small orange fox with a white-tipped tail rests on the inner curve of a pale golden crescent moon. Thin dark outlines define the fox, while the moon is shaded with speckled tan and gold tones. Sprigs of green leaves, buds and peach-coloured flowers gather at the lower left and bottom of the moon on a plain white background.

Fine line Botanical Fox Moon Crescent moon Leaves Flower Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My mother swore the fox had been sleeping on the moon since the winter the mill burned, and she would not be argued out of it. Every October she walked me up through the beech wood behind the church to the stile where the trees thin out, and she pointed at the crescent sitting low over the ploughed fields. There it was, a rust-coloured shape curled along the inner curve, its white-tipped tail hanging down over the edge, its nose tucked under one paw as if it had only just settled in for the evening.

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I was twelve before I saw it for myself. Dad had a brass telescope he never used, and I dragged it up to the stile with a torch and a flask of cocoa gone lukewarm. The moon came into the lens so bright it hurt my eyes. There was nothing but craters and a grey smudge like a thumbprint on glass. I told her so at breakfast, and she only buttered her toast and said the fox was shy and I had been looking in the wrong place.

The hedges went pale with blossom that spring, and the sloe buds came up along the lane the way they always do. Mum took ill in February. In March I went up alone with the telescope, cross because I had promised her I would look. The cloud drew off and the crescent hung there, clean as a fingernail. Then something moved on its curve, a flick of white tail, and the fox lifted its head and looked, I swear, straight down the lens at me.

I never told anyone. I pressed a sprig of hawthorn into her hymnbook, the one with her name written inside the cover, and every October since I have walked up to the stile and waited for the moon to come round low over the fields.