Coloured drawing of a sleeping orange fox with a white chest and dark ears, framed in an oval of brown branches and green ivy, suited to a botanical tattoo design.

Sleeping fox in an ivy wreath

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A fox sits in profile with its eyes closed and its head turned slightly down, set against a pale blue wash background. Its body is shaded in orange and amber with dark outlines, and the white chest and black-tipped ears are kept clear of heavy shading. An oval frame of brown twigs and green ivy leaves encloses the fox, giving a centred, symmetrical composition.

Botanical Fox Branches Wreath Leaves Oval frame

Find an artist for this

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

Nobody in Hollin Bottom could say when the fox first started sleeping in the ivy over Mrs Pardoe's gate. Her husband swore it was the same animal that had taken his hens in the spring, and that it had grown fat and lazy on what the village left out. Mrs Pardoe said nothing. She only began setting a saucer of milk at the foot of the post each evening, and by Lammas the fox no longer ran when the door opened.

Keep reading

The lane climbed past the quarry to the old drovers' road, and most weeks a carter called Tobias Wren came up it with coal for the chapel. He saw the fox curled in the wreath of cut twigs she had woven round the gatepost, eyes shut, nose tucked into its shoulder, and he laughed and said a beast that slept so soundly had nothing to fear from men. He said it loudly, so the whole row could hear.

One evening Wren came back down the lane with a stick in his hand and a grudge in his chest. The gate stood open. The saucer was empty. The fox lay in its ring of green leaves, and when he lifted the stick it opened one eye, looked at him the way the chapel bell looks at a late man, and closed it again. Wren stood there until the light went gold on the quarry face. Then he put the stick down and went home the long way round.

Mrs Pardoe, when she heard of it, only said that a creature who trusts you has already made its bargain, and went in to fill the saucer. Every autumn after that the ivy over her gate grew a little thicker, and the milk was never once left to sour.