A tattooist in black gloves uses a machine to work on a partly finished animal design with purple outlines and grey shading on a person's skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattoo being inked with a machine

Black and grey · Photo

A tattooist in black nitrile gloves works on the skin with a rotary machine. The partly finished design shows an animal head in purple linework, with grey shading lower down and a stencil-like outline around it. The background is a plain white drape, with the artist's tattooed forearm visible at the right edge.

Tattoo machine Glove Animal Outline Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox had been drawn on the back of an old ferry timetable, and by the time the customs officer at Coquelles lifted it from the pocket of Marguerite's coat, the creases had gone soft as cotton. He turned it over and studied the pointed ears, then the frayed cuff of her sleeve. "Is it a pet?" he asked. She told him it was a stencil, and that her cousin in Lille would know what to do with it, and he stamped the card in her passport without looking up again.

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Odile kept a shop above a bakery on the rue de Thiers, where the air smelled of burnt sugar and machine oil. She had inked half the dockworkers in the city and most of their mothers' initials. She laid the paper flat on the counter, pressed carbon over the lines, and held the fox up to the window so the light came through. "Purple for the eyes," she said. "Your grandmother always wanted purple. Grey for the shadow where the fur goes dark, and leave the ear tips bare, so they look like they're listening."

Marguerite watched her trace the outline onto thin film and thought about the summer the fox had raided the henhouse behind their farm at Wissant, how her grandmother had stood in the yard in her nightdress and laughed until she had to sit down on the step. The fox had never been caught. Nobody had ever seen it twice.

When the stencil was peeled away and the fox sat clean on its backing, Odile handed the timetable back. Beneath the fox's chin, the printed departure read 06:40, for a crossing that stopped running years ago. Marguerite folded it into quarters and put it back in her pocket, where it would stay.