Black ink drawing of a stylised leaping fox filled with ornamental swirls, shown as a blackwork tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental leaping fox design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised fox leaps to the right, its tail sweeping upward into a feathered, curling plume. The body is built from black linework with inner scrollwork, hatching and fine stippled texture, leaving areas of white paper showing through. The drawing uses black ink only on a plain off-white background, with the figure filling most of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the fox came back on Tuesday, right in the middle of the market square while Mrs Pell was counting out her bobbins. You would have laughed. It didn't run, it leapt, straight over a cart of cabbages and up the side of the chemist's wall, and its tail went up behind it like smoke that had decided to curl. Mrs Pell swears it's the same fox that took her hens in March, but I think foxes all look alike when you're frightened of them.

Keep reading

Father would have known what to make of it. You remember the pattern he drew for the Whitcombe collar, the one with scrolls that never quite close? The fox looked like that. Every curl seemed pulled out of a single thread and left hanging in the air. I went down on Wednesday with my sketchbook and sat on the step of the old well for an hour, but it never came back. I drew it anyway, the hatching along its ribs and the small white holes where the light got through.

On Thursday Eleanor Whitcombe brought her wedding veil in with the hem torn, and when I bent over it I found a run of stitches where the tear had been, neat as a signature and in a pattern I had never taught anyone. I didn't ask who had done it. I only worked the rest of the border to match and charged her nothing.

I've pinned the drawing above the bench where the light is best. Write soon, and tell me whether the lace trade is as dull in Leeds as everyone says.

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