Colour tattoo of a sleeping fox curled on a stack of books, placed on the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping fox on a stack of books

Back · Colour · Photo

A fox with its eyes closed rests its head on a stack of three books, with its bushy tail draped over the side. The linework is fine and sketchy, with soft shading on the fox's fur and the book covers. Orange ink dominates the fox while the books are rendered in grey and muted green tones against a plain background of skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step, it's loose, same as the rest of this house. Sit down, the pair of you, and don't mind Mrs Pargeter's knitting. Now, the fox. You'll want to know why a fox would sleep on a pile of books when there's a whole hedgerow to nap in.

Keep reading

Ask Tobias Quill, who kept the reading room above the chandlery in Wexcombe Bay for forty winters. Every evening he'd climb the stairs with his lamp and find the same russet thing curled on the top volume of the almanacs, tail hanging down over the brass rail like a bell-rope. He tried to shoo it. It only opened one eye, closed it again, and went on dreaming.

Then the sea came up the lane that February, and the reading room flooded to the sills. Tobias waded in with a bucket and found the fox still asleep on the stack of ledgers, the water lapping at its paws. He should have left it to the gulls. Instead he lifted the whole pile, books and fox together, and carried them up to the attic where the tide couldn't reach.

Here's the thing they never tell you. Next morning the books were dry, every page, and the fox had gone. But pressed into the damp leather of the top volume were four small prints, and tucked between the pages, a single russet hair holding the place in a chapter Tobias had never finished. So if you're after a moral, you can take that home with you, though I'd keep it quiet. Now, who wants the one about the lighthouse keeper's cat?

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