Pencil sketch of a fox with its head turned back over its shoulder, drawn as a simple black outline design on grey paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised fox outline sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised fox is shown in profile with its head turned back over its shoulder and its bushy tail curling toward the bottom left. The figure is drawn in bold, tapering black pencil lines with minimal shading, leaving the body largely open. The image is entirely black and grey on a pale, textured paper background, and the fox fills most of the frame.

Fox Tail Sketch Outline Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, shush now, and mind the gull on the rail, he's been listening since breakfast. Old Tobias Crane had a fox that came down to Saltmere every winter, when the herring boats rode low and the nets stank of tar. Red as a pennant she was, and thin as a wet rope, and she never once came up the quay in daylight. She went along the wall instead, looking back over her shoulder at the harbour as though she'd left something in it.

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One January the Crane boy, Eli, ten years old and sure of everything, followed her out to the breakwater. The tide was out and the sand was grey as slate. She stopped at the foot of the old lighthouse steps and turned her head right round, slow, the way you'd check a door you'd already locked. Eli said she looked at him for the length of a held breath, and then she lifted her tail, all black ticks and points like the lightning on a storm chart, and walked into the sea mist without a splash.

Nobody believed him, not even his father, who had heard the same tale from his own grandmother and didn't care for it. But that spring the herring came back in such numbers the nets split at the seams, and the mist rose off the water each morning exactly where the fox had gone. Eli grew into a man who mended nets for a living, and he never once turned his back on the harbour wall without looking round.

So when the mist comes in tonight, you'll know what it is. Not a ghost, mind. Just a fox keeping an eye on the tide, the way somebody ought to.