Colour tattoo of a leaping fox with a curling tail and a swirl beneath it, placed on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaping fox on the upper thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A fox crouches or leaps with its body arched and its bushy tail curling up behind it, rendered in orange, red and amber tones. Dark outlines and soft grey shading define the legs, ears and muzzle, and a small dark swirl trails beneath the animal. The design fills the frame across the outer thigh, with the person's black shorts visible at the top.

Thigh Fox Tail Swirl

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 up from the coal yard every night at ten past three, and every night Dorothy Pask propped the loading bay door with a fire bucket so it could get through. Nobody had asked her to. The porters said it was bad for the cold stores and the night sister on Ward Nine said it was bad luck, but Dorothy had worked nights long enough to know a building needed something awake in it that wasn't a monitor.

Keep reading

That February a lad came in off the Leeds road with his hand wrapped in a tea towel, the blood already gone brown through it. The porter wheeled him towards the lift, and the fox was standing in the corridor between them with its tail curled round its feet, and it would not shift. Dorothy stepped over it. Her gran had told her that a fox on a threshold is owed something, that it collects in its own time, and that you should never ask it what the debt is.

The lad lived. Dorothy had stitched worse in the cadets' first aid tent on Remembrance Sunday, so she knew what she was looking at. Afterwards the fox went down the long corridor in one leap over a linen trolley, its tail a flame behind it, and vanished through the swing doors of the lift lobby. On the wet tiles where it had landed there were marks like a brush swept through soot, curving away towards the stairs.

In the morning the bucket was gone from the loading bay and the door was shut. A single red hair was caught on the step, and when the day porter swept it up he found the coal yard gate open and a paper bag on the bench, still warm, with no name on it.