Hand-drawn tattoo design of a fox with an orange body, white-tipped tail, green leaves and blue swirls on white paper, with no placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fox with leaves and swirls design

Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a fox seen from above, curled so its head points downward with a large bushy tail that wraps around its body. The fox has black outlined features, a white-tipped tail and orange fur coloured in pencil or marker, with a blue outline and swirling blue tendrils. Green leaves, small red dots and a white paper background complete the composition.

Fox Tail Leaves Swirl Dot Animal Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, there's a lamp on the third rung, and don't you go whistling down the shaft, not with the fox about. Old Hannah Pryce used to say that, and her grandmother said it before her, and I'll say it to you now because the sump is wet tonight and the cage is slow. The fox came down the Lantern Level the winter the Ashgrove pit flooded, when the men were still sleeping in the top street and the company had stopped paying for the pumps.

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Nobody saw where it came from. It walked along the haulage road as though it owned the rails, red as a coal fire, its tail curled round its body like creeper that had grown the wrong way. Where it set its feet, green shoots pushed up through the black dust. Tommy Doyle, who was a boy then and had more nerve than sense, followed it past the last timber. He said the blue light that came off its brush was cold enough to frost his eyelashes. He kept walking because the fox kept looking back at him.

At the bottom of the workings, where the water stood to a man's knee, it stopped and dipped its narrow head, and it began to dig with the white tip of its tail. Tommy swore later that it turned the sludge over like a baker kneading dough. Out of the muck came a row of tin lamps, then a tin whistle, then a pair of boots with the laces still tied. Each thing it uncovered it laid on a dry ledge, then sat back on its haunches and waited for someone to claim it.

The company men never believed a word of it. But the pumps were started again the next morning, the green shoots came up through the cinders on the spoil heap, and the pit has never flooded since. Tommy kept the whistle on a nail above his bed. He still says that if you hear one blown in the tunnels, you should answer it, and then put your lamp down and walk the other way.