Colour tattoo on an upper arm of a stylised girl in a dark patterned dress beside a group of orange foxes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl with a group of foxes on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised girl with a dark bob and a long dark dress with patterned trim stands on the left, with a small fox beside her and another fox partly visible at the edge. On the right, a cluster of orange foxes with black linework and shading gather around one another. The orange tones dominate the foxes, while the girl's dress is mostly solid black and grey against pale skin.

Upper arm Girl Fox Dress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The foxes came down from Hollin Wood the week the miller's wife stopped singing, and nobody in Coldharbour thought to ask why. Maud Pennock, who was eleven and wore a black wool dress her aunt had sewn with a band of grey braid at the hem, was the only one who went out to meet them. She took the crust from her supper and walked to the edge of the stubble field, where the frost lay thin as paper.

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The foxes did not come close. They sat in a loose ring, orange as banked coals, their dark stockings bright against the white ground, and they watched her the way the parish watched a new vicar. The eldest, a vixen with one ear folded over, stepped forward and laid something at Maud's feet. It was a brass key gone green with age, the kind that opened the chapel strongbox the sexton had lost in the flood.

Maud carried the key home under her shawl and said nothing. Her aunt found it in the drawer that night and went white, because the box had held the parish tithes for forty years and the sexton had been blamed for its loss. By morning the foxes were gone. In the frost along the lane there were only small neat prints leading off towards the wood, each one set down exactly where the last had been.

Nobody ever asked Maud how she came by the key, and she never offered. Years later, when she kept the forge at the crossroads, she still left heel crusts on the stubble for whatever passed in the dark. The vicar's sister called it foolishness. Maud only said the foxes had kept their side of the bargain, and that she had never been told what the bargain was.