Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a skeletal fox skull inside an orange ring, with green leaves and sprigs, on the arm.

Skeletal fox skull and sprig on the arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A skeletal fox skull with red ears and dark eye sockets sits at the centre of the design, with a visible ribcage beneath it. The skull and ribs are shaded in grey with bold black outlines, and the ears and a red-orange disc behind the skull add strong colour. Green leaves and thin sprigs curve around the lower half of the ring, filling the composition from the bottom left to the top right.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Fox Skull Skeleton Ribcage Leaves Sprig Ring Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox came down to Porthmellow the winter the herring failed, and it had no flesh left on it, only the bones, strung together by something that was not quite thread. The fishwives saw it first at the back of the salting sheds, picking at the scales in the gutters with its white jaw, and they agreed it was a bad sign and a worse one to shoo away.

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Old Nan Tregar, who kept the net loft, said the fox was not hungry. It was looking for the thing it had lost, and foxes that come back for a lost thing never leave until they find it. So when the boy Ioan asked what it had lost, she shrugged and tied a sprig of rosemary to its tail with red wool, because rosemary is for remembering and red is for warding.

The fox took the sprig and walked the harbour wall at dusk, ribs clicking like loose oars, stopping at each boat. At the last slipway it lay down in the shallows where the lantern light broke into rings on the water. Ioan waded out after it and found, under the weed, a small iron ring the colour of rust, the kind a lobster pot is hung by. He pulled it free, and the fox sat up, and its ears flushed red as the first light.

It did not thank him. It only turned its skull to the bay and trotted off across the water as if it were a field, the rosemary bobbing behind. Ioan kept the ring on a string around his neck for the rest of his life, and on still evenings the fishwives said the harbour smelled of sprigs and sea salt, and that a fox had got what it came for.