Two black ink tattoos of running foxes on the backs of a pair of hands and wrists, held together against a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Running foxes across the hands

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are held together against a plain white background, each carrying a black ink tattoo of a running fox that stretches from the wrist across the back of the hand. The animals are drawn as bold dark silhouettes with some interior detail and solid areas of black. A smaller dark line motif sits higher up on the wrist at the top left of the frame.

Blackwork Hand Fox Silhouette Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat was called Marigold, and she had not travelled in a straight line since the spring flood took her cabin roof off at Tewkesbury. Dad said the foxes came down to the water every evening once the lock keeper had gone home, two of them, one russet and one grey at the muzzle, and they ran the towpath as if they were late for something. I never believed him until the night I saw them myself, running flat out along the bank beside the hull as though the boat were the thing they were chasing.

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They kept pace with us past Lower Lode, through the reeds where the herons stand on one leg, and into the cut under the railway bridge where every engine sounds like a train. I stood at the tiller with a torch I didn't need, watching the russet one lengthen her stride, her shoulders rolling like water over a weir. The grey one stayed close behind, so near that their tails brushed the nettles. Dad had told me the trick was not to call out. You let them run.

At the lock gate, where the water drops away in a slow green stair, the pair of them stopped dead and turned to face the boat. I expected a bark or a flash of tail into the hedge. Instead the russet one lay down on the brick edge and watched me work the paddles, patient as a cat, while the grey one trotted up the lock side and looked back over its shoulder, once, as if to check I had understood.

I hadn't, not then. It was only when the water rose under us and the gates groaned open that I understood what Dad had meant. The foxes had never been chasing Marigold. They were showing the way through, the way anyone who has lived on the cut learns to follow without being asked.