Sheet of seven numbered black silhouette designs of nine-tailed foxes with white linework, in seated, leaping and standing poses.

Seven nine-tailed fox designs

Black and grey · Flash

A numbered sheet of seven black fox silhouettes, each with nine fanned tails and white linework marking the fur, tail tips and body details. The poses vary between seated, rearing and standing, with some figures showing a fox head in profile and others showing the full body. The drawings are solid black with white lines and no colour, and they are arranged in a loose grid with the numbers placed beside each design.

Fox Silhouette Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time you reach the canal bridge the streetlamps have started their low hum, and the fox is sitting on the parapet as if it has been waiting for the last bus. Its tails fan out behind it like a bent umbrella, nine of them, each tipped with a thin white edge that catches the sodium glow. You have seen foxes rummaging through the bins on Pell Street. You have never seen one count you.

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It does not speak so much as tap, the way a shopkeeper rattles a shutter to say closing time. It tells you that you owe it nine favours and that you have already paid for the first. You ask which one. It turns the tip of its outermost tail towards you, and there, in the fine white line, is the night in March when you missed the last train to Salford and wished, out loud, that you could simply vanish into the dark. The fox was listening. Foxes always are.

The second favour is a lantern to carry across the river before dawn, to a stall on the far bank that sells nothing but pencils and salt. The third is a name you must not say until the cathedral bells stop. The city thins around you as you walk: the kebab shops go dark, the taxis stop circling, and the fox trots ahead with its tails rising and falling like someone counting beads. Somewhere near the seventh favour you realise it has been counting the favours you will do for it, not the ones already done.

At first light you find a single white line of paint on the inside of your wrist, fine as a hair, curling to a point. The bridge is empty. Down on the water a pencil and a twist of salt float past, turning slowly, and you understand that the eighth tail has grown in while you were not looking.