Blue and black pencil drawing of a stylised fox-like creature with a long, curling, swirl-patterned tail, on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirl-tailed fox design in blue

Colour · Flash

A stylised fox-like creature sits upright, facing left, with a long tail that coils around its base in spirals. The body and tail are filled with small swirling ornamental patterns, and loose spirals also appear in the background. The linework is dark and the shading is blue, with pale highlights on the fur, set against a plain white background.

Fox Creature Swirl Spiral Tail Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had been sitting on the harbour wall since the herring boats went out, her tail wound three times round the iron bollard as if she meant to moor herself there. Nobody in Saltcombe asked her to move. The fishermen's wives left her saucers of skimmed milk, and the boys who dared each other to touch her tail came back with their palms full of blue dust and no stories they would admit to.

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Old Maud Pellow, who kept the ropewalk, said the tail was not really a tail at all but the last thread of the north wind, tied off on the day the wind was sent away. Every spiral in it was a knot, and every knot held one gust that had never been let loose over the water.

Her grandson Tobias did not believe a word of it until the spring the boats failed to come home. He climbed the wall with a pair of scissors from the sailmaker's shop, and the fox turned her green eyes on him and said, quite plainly, "Not that one. The little curl by the end. Start there, and the sea will hear you coming."

He cut the smallest loop. A thin cold breath spilled out across the bay, lifting the mist and tipping the fleet home one by one through the gap in the rocks. When he turned round the fox had gone, the stone where she had sat was faintly blue, and somewhere out past the point a single spiral of cloud was unwinding slowly into the sky.