Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two mirrored stylised animals with curled tails

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two stylised animals placed as mirror images, each sitting upright with its head turned toward the other. Their bodies are built from bold solid black shapes with negative-space markings, and each ends in a long, curling tail. The design is in black ink on a plain white background, with a centred, symmetrical composition.

Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My aunt Brigid said the two foxes on the church gate had been facing each other since the year the bridge washed away, and that nobody had ever seen them turn their backs. We were hanging paper lanterns for the wedding when she told me, a hundred guests due by six and the cake still in its box on the bus seat. She had a voice like gravel in a bucket and never told a story without a sugar lump in her cheek.

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The story went like this, or near enough. Two fox sisters lived on opposite banks of the Tarrow, each with a tail that curled up behind her like the end of a fiddle scroll. They had quarrelled over a stolen trout, and for seven winters they sat on their own sides of the water, heads cocked, waiting for the other to speak first. The river rose and fell. Their tails grew longer from all that sitting, Brigid said, because a grudge needs room to lie down.

On the eighth spring the ice broke early and a boy from the mill went through it. Each fox saw him go under from her own bank. Neither moved for the length of a breath, and then both moved at once, meeting in the shallows where the water came only to the knee, and they dragged him out between them by the collar of his coat.

I asked what happened to the trout. Brigid laughed until she had to sit on a hay bale. Then she straightened my lantern and said the trout had been the best thing that ever happened to either of them, since it gave them a reason to stand so close.