Black and grey fine line full sleeve on an upper arm and shoulder, showing a whale, mountains, a fox, ferns and foxglove, with a small teal octopus at the top of the shoulder.

Full arm sleeve with whale, fox and foliage

Fine line · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full arm sleeve shown from two angles against a plain background. It includes a whale above mountains and pine trees, a fox running below, ferns, foxglove flowers and a small bird, linked by cloud motifs and small dots. The linework is fine and the mountains are shaded with dotwork, with the sleeve almost entirely in black and grey apart from a small teal octopus at the top of the shoulder.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Whale Mountain Tree Cloud Fox Fern Flower Bird Octopus Triangle Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had been running since the tide turned, and nobody on the north shore could say why it would not stop. Old Mairi Gunn saw it first from the cliff path, a red streak cutting through the bracken below the pines with its tail held straight out like a rudder. Far off, where the sea went grey and then blue, a humpback breached and went under again, and the children at the harbour swore it was keeping pace with the fox.

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Nobody believed the children. Mairi did. She had spent forty winters mending nets and reading the weather in the lichen on the rocks, and she knew what it meant when foxgloves came up early on the scree and ferns unrolled in a week that should have been frost. The mountains behind the village had gone silver with cloud, and the little grey wren that lived in the wall of her yard had stopped singing. Something was shifting the whole country a step to the east.

She took her oilskin and her grandfather's brass compass and followed the fox up past the last dry-stone dyke. At the top of the ridge the animal sat waiting, neither tame nor wild, and beyond it the sea had risen to meet the sky in a long pale wall. A whale's back broke the surface in the shallows where no whale had any business being, and somewhere under the water something with eight arms was counting the seconds.

The fox trotted down toward the bay and did not look back. Mairi stood a long while on the ridge with the wind in her collar. Then she shut the compass, turned her back on the water and walked home. By morning the tide had gone where it belonged and the foxgloves on the scree had shrivelled to nothing, though the wren was singing again and the net on her wall held one silver fish that nobody could name.