Fox portrait with roses on a wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A fox head in side profile is drawn in dark outline with light shading, set against a cluster of pink roses, buds and green leaves along the forearm. The fox is rendered in black and grey while the flowers carry the colour, with a soft, mostly plain background. The hand is raised above the wrist, which places the tattoo clearly in view.

Botanical Forearm Fox Rose Flower Leaves Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook aboard the Marigold kept one rule above all others: nothing was to be fed to the foxes that came down from the cliffs at the Lizard. Tom Pellow broke it on the third night of the calm, when a vixen the colour of tarred rope sat on the galley step and would not be shooed. He tossed her the gristle from the mutton, then a heel of bread, and she ate both with her head cocked to one side, as though weighing him.

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Each night after that she came back, and each night she brought something. A snail. A blackbird's egg, cracked and empty. Once a pink rose cut from some cottage garden onshore, its stem still wrapped in a damp rag, which she laid at his boots as neatly as a purser's tally. Tom asked the mate where a fox would find a rose at sea, and the mate said the same place a fox found anything, by being cleverer than the man who owned it.

On the last night of the calm the wind came back out of the west, and the vixen did not. Tom went up with the lantern and found her at the rail, looking not at the water but back toward the land, where the cliffs showed pale under the moon. Beside her lay a bundle of roses, fresh cut, their petals still shut tight. He understood then that she had been carrying them one by one for weeks, from a garden he would never see, and that she meant to take them home.

He gathered them up, shook the spray from the stems and held them out to her. She took them one at a time, the way she had taken everything, and went over the side into the dark, leaving him with the smell of crushed petals and salt on his hands.