Profile woman and fox headdress on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The left photograph shows a close-up of a forearm tattoo with a woman's profile, a fox head worn as a headdress, a teal circle, a small ship and overlapping geometric lines and grids. The right photograph shows the same design with a scatter of stars above it, and a second forearm carrying a hand outline joined to teal dots by thin connecting lines. The work is mostly black fine linework with stippled dotwork shading, with small touches of teal and red ink, set against plain pale backgrounds.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Woman Profile Fox Ship Star Constellation Hand Dot Circle Line

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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 came off its peg in the back room of the chandler's shop the week the Lark was due, and Mabel Ferrier was the only one in Saltcombe who would wear it. She pulled its jaws down over her hair, let the grey brush fall between her shoulders, and walked out to the breakwater before the lamps were lit. Nobody argued. The harbour master had lost two boats to the Mercy Shoal that spring, and he had stopped asking for proof.

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Her grandmother had taught her the trick of it. A fox sees the dark better than a man, so you do not look at the water, you look at what is above it. Mabel sat on the cold stone with a slate across her knees and a stub of pencil behind one ear, and she drew what the sky gave her: a scatter of pinpricks, then a thin line from one to the next, then a hand lifting from the sea to point. The teal ink lived in a tobacco tin for the places where the moon would have to sit once it rose.

The fog came in at midnight, thick as wool. The Lark's bell was somewhere out past the reef, ringing in the wrong place, and Mabel heard the crew shouting to each other about rocks. She held the slate up to the one clear gap in the cloud and let the lines do their work. When the captain finally brought his ship round the point, he said he had seen a fox's face in the sky and followed its nose through the channel.

Three winters later a deckhand came to the chandler's door with a fresh sting of ink on his forearm, a row of dots joined by a thread of black. He asked whether the old woman still made the drawings. The fox hood hung where it always hung, and the slate was still propped against the wall, its lines gone soft with handling. He paid for the work in coins, and he never once looked at the water when he walked home.