Black and grey shaded fox tattoo with its tail curled round, on the outer upper arm of a person in a pink top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seated fox on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A fox sits in profile, facing left, with its tail curling up beside its body. The outline is dark and the fur is built up with soft grey shading, with lighter areas left open on the chest and tail. The design fills most of the upper arm against a plain skin background, with a pink top and part of a shoulder visible.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the fox's hour on Skerra the way you learn the tide tables, by standing about where you should not be. It arrives at the harbour wall as the mainland ferry noses in, sits down on the flat stone by the bollard, and waits with its back very straight, as if it has been hired to receive the post.

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Its tail comes round beside it and curls up at the tip, a grey spiral you could lose a ring in. Old Isla Corrie, who kept the tide book at the Mill House for forty years, said the fox was there before the pier, before the school, before the first boat with a name painted on its bow. She left bread crusts on the third stone every night and wrote the weather beside them, so that her successors would know which winters had been hard.

The winter the ferry stopped, you went down alone with a torch and found the stone bare. Only fox prints went up the shingle toward the peat road, and then they came back, neat and close, to the place where the crusts had always been. The fox was sitting there again in the morning, facing the water, its ears flat against a wind that was not blowing yet.

You put the crust down and step back. It does not eat. It turns its head and looks at you over its shoulder, that long unhurried look the islanders give strangers, and then it turns back to the sea. The tail lifts, uncurls once in the cold light, and settles into its spiral again, as if the fox has decided the boat is coming after all.

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