Colour watercolour tattoo of a white fox silhouette with black outline on the side of the ribs, surrounded by pink, blue, orange and purple washes.

Fox silhouette in watercolour splashes on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A fox sits in profile with its head raised and tail curled around its body, drawn as a pale negative-space silhouette edged in fine black line. Behind and around it, pink, orange, blue and purple washes bleed outwards with soft, uneven edges, with scattered dark speckles at the top and sides. The tattoo fills a tall vertical area on the side of the ribs against plain skin.

Ribs Fox Watercolour splash Dot Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint tin had been left open on the gunwale overnight, and by morning a skin had formed over the cobalt. Dilys worked it loose with a bent nail, stirring until the colour came up glossy and deep, then sat on the coal box with her brush across her knees and waited for the lock-keeper's van to pass before she started on the doors.

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Her father had painted roses on every boat he'd owned, tight red roses with leaves like cupped hands, and he used to say a boat without flowers was just a box that floated. She had never liked roses. For three weeks a fox had been coming down the towpath at dusk, sitting on the bollard by the lock with its tail wrapped round its feet, watching the Sunflower as if it were the one thing on the canal that had been expected.

On the fourth evening she painted the fox instead. She left its shape bare, a pale hollow in the wood, and washed the colours round it: rose pink bleeding into orange, a bruise of violet, and the river blue she had mixed from the last of the cobalt and too much water, so it ran wherever it liked. Where the wash went wrong she flicked black spots from the bristles, like sparks off a bonfire, and let them dry.

Next morning the fox was gone, but there were prints in the soft mud by the bollard, neat as stitches, and the lock-keeper's wife said it had been her husband's mother's fox, the one that lived under the old wharf when Dilys's father was a boy. The paint was still tacky when Dilys ran her thumb along the outline. Nothing had smudged. The fox sat exactly where she'd left it, all that colour pulling away from its edges, as though the river had turned round to look.