Black dotwork and geometric linework tattoo of a leaping animal with a curled tail and a dotted arc above it, shown on skin in a circular crop.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric leaping animal with dotted arc

Dotwork · Black and grey · Photo

A leaping four-legged animal with a long curled tail is built from angular, faceted facets and outlined in bold linework. Its body is filled with stippled dots and parallel hatching that create shading, and a dotted arc sits above its back. The image is black ink on pale skin, with the subject centred in a circular crop against a dark background.

Dotwork Geometric Animal Fox Tail

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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 comes over the garden wall the night the greenhouse glass goes missing, and you are the only one awake to see it. Your father has been dead a fortnight, and the allotment society has given you until Sunday to clear the plot or lose it. Still, you keep the lamp on. Something is taking the rhubarb crowns one by one, and it is not slugs.

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It does not run like an animal from the hedgerows. It runs in planes, each leg a shard of slate turned to catch the moon, its back cut into facets the way a jeweller would cut a stone. Where its flank should be soft there is only grain, dense and pricked, as if someone has walked a pin over the paper until the light gathered in the holes. Above it, a ring of dots hangs in the air where the dew is settling. You count them once, forty-one, then stop, because the fox has turned its head and is looking straight at the lamp.

You expect it to bolt. Instead it lifts its tail, a long curl like the end of a fiddle scroll, and leaps the bed of leeks in one clean line, landing where the glass should be. Under the broken frame, wrapped in newspaper from 1974, is your father's cold frame logbook. In it, on every night he sat out here, he drew this same animal, always mid-air, never once on the ground.