Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an anatomical heart holding a sleeping fox, with pine trees, a crescent moon and stars, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox sleeping in an anatomical heart on an upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeping fox curls inside an anatomical heart, with its head resting at the lower right. Pine trees, a crescent moon and small star marks sit above the heart. The heart uses bold outlines and fine line detail, while the shading inside the heart and around the fox is built from stippled dots, and the photo shows the tattoo on an upper arm against a city street.

Dotwork Upper arm Heart Fox Pine tree Moon Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox turned up on the third night out of Hull, curled in the coil of mooring line behind the winch with its nose tucked under its tail as if it had booked a berth. The bosun wanted it put over the side. Cook Ruth Abernethy said a fox aboard meant the sea would keep its temper, and she fed it the rind off her bacon while he grumbled about rats and luck.

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For eleven days it slept wherever the warmth was: on the boiler casing, in the lee of the wheelhouse, once on a pile of old canvas in the sail locker. I took the middle watch, two till six, and it would come and sit by my boots and watch the water as though it were doing the navigating. Sometimes I'd look up from the chart table and see the moon hanging over the bow, the stars thick as spilt salt, and the fox a dark shape with its eyes closed against the spray.

Off the Norwegian coast the wind died and we lay at the mouth of a fjord waiting for the pilot. Pines came down to the water in black ranks, and the fox woke, stretched, and looked at the trees for a long time. Ruth said it had been dreaming of land the whole crossing, and that was why it had chosen us, since we were the only ones heading that way.

When the gangway went down at dusk, the fox walked off without a backward glance, along the quay and up into the pines. I stayed at the rail until the moon was the only light left on the slope. In the morning I found a single rust-coloured hair caught on the hatch lip, and I kept it in my breast pocket for the rest of the voyage, which was longer than I had meant it to be.