Black and grey geometric fox head tattoo with a wheat sprig on the outer thigh, drawn in dotwork and fine line shading.

Geometric fox head on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A fox head faces forward, built from angular facets and sharp triangular planes, with feathered fine-line ears and a dotwork-stippled muzzle. A slender leaf and a wheat ear sit beneath the chin, with whisker lines fanning out from the snout. The piece is entirely black ink in varied grey tones, centred on pale skin with a soft, out-of-focus background.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Fox Wheat Leaf Sprig Animal Geometric shape Whiskers

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came down to Porthgwidden the week the herring turned, and nobody saw her cross the breakwater. By the time you reached the net loft at dawn she was already sitting on the cold stones with a wheat ear clamped in her teeth like a pencil, and a sprig of bay laid beside her forepaws. Mrs Penhallow swore the animal had been counting the gulls. You didn't believe her, not until the fox looked up at you with eyes as sharp as the tin roofs and pushed the bay leaf across the stones with one careful paw.

Keep reading

She wanted nothing you could spend. She wanted the sums put right. Every night you walked the harbour wall and laid a single ear of grain at the foot of the lighthouse steps, and every morning the boats came home with their holds full. You kept the tally on a slate by the lamp, drawing triangles and cut-glass planes, because that was the only language she seemed to read: three sides, a point, a shadow thrown the right way.

In November the slate ran out. You went up to the loft to find chalk and found the fox asleep in the drying nets, muzzle on her paws, the wheat gone grey with damp. For the first time she looked old. You understood then that the harbour had been paying her all along, in small favours nobody remembered, and that the debt had quietly passed to you.

You carried a full sack of grain to the lighthouse steps at low tide. When you looked back she was standing at the top of the wall, every plane of her face lit by the turning beam, and she did not come down. The boats went out at first light. You still count the sails coming in, and the number always comes out right.