Black ornamental tattoo of a mandala-patterned animal silhouette with dotwork detail on the upper thigh, under a yellow skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala-patterned animal on thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black tattoo of a stylised animal, possibly a fox or deer, faces left on the outer upper thigh. The body is filled with mandala-like patterns, dots and curved line motifs, with bold outlines around the silhouette. The tattoo is black only, and the photo is a phone screenshot with a yellow skirt at the top edge and a plain background.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Animal Fox Deer Mandala Ornament Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't fidget, Tom, the range has only just caught, and I'll not tell this twice. You want to know why your grandad never once put a gun on a fox in forty years? It's because of the one that came up Scarth Lane the winter the beck froze solid.

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It was thin as a rake and it stopped at the yard gate and turned its head left, the way you'd turn for a door you thought you heard. Its flank was marked all over with rings and dots, pressed in like a thumb in wet clay, and your great-granny always said it looked like frost on a pane, the kind you only see when the cold has been at the glass all night. Your grandad said it was a deer's ghost that had lost its antlers. I said it was a fox that had got lost on its way to somewhere better.

The hens went quiet that week, but nothing was taken. Every morning there were prints across the yard, and they never went out the way they had come in. They circled the midden, then the well, then the bottom of the orchard, each loop wider and more finished than the last, like somebody drawing a ring round a thing they meant to keep. Your grandad followed them with the lantern and found they stopped dead at the gate, where the fox had sat and waited for him.

So he left the gate open that night and a dish of milk on the step, and went to bed. In the morning the dish was licked clean and the snow was blank, not a mark in it. But on the inside of the byre door, scratched in the frost, was a ring of dots exactly the width of that dish. Your grandad left the gate open every winter after that, and I never once asked him why.