Colour tattoo of a fox, pocket watch and autumn leaves on the outer thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox, pocket watch and leaves on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A fox head with a pocket watch and clustered autumn leaves in orange, purple and red, all tattooed on the outer thigh. The linework is bold with smooth colour shading on the fox's face and fur. The tattoo fills the left side of the frame against pale wooden flooring, with a white lace garment visible at the bottom.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, and mind the windfalls. You asked how the fox came by the watch, and I'll tell it the way my grandmother told it to me, under the same apple tree that still bears, though nobody remembers what season it's meant to be.

Keep reading

Before the hedges grew over the lanes, there was a clockmaker in Marrowby who had lost his hours. He had no clock left that kept true, so each evening he sat on the wall and counted the leaves coming down instead. A red fox came by most nights to take the crab apples nobody picked. The clockmaker said she was stealing time. She said he was keeping the wrong sort of accounts.

One autumn the wind turned hard, and the clockmaker didn't come to the wall. The fox went to his workshop and found him asleep among his springs, a pocket watch open in his hand, its glass cracked and its hands pointing at nothing. She took the watch in her teeth, carried it to the orchard, and laid it under the oldest tree. Then she waited for the leaves to cover it, which they did, one after another, purple and orange and rust, until the hands were lost beneath them.

When the frost came, the children of Marrowby found her curled around the watch. She wouldn't let them lift it until one of them knelt and listened. Under the leaves, very faintly, it was still ticking. So that is why, when the lane clock stops, we don't go looking for the hour. We go and find the fox, and we stay quiet until we hear it.

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