Fine line drawing of two nine-tailed foxes with pink-tipped tails beside Japanese characters, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two nine-tailed foxes in fine line

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows two slender foxes with nine tails each, one standing upright on the left and one leaping on the right, with two Japanese characters between them. The linework is thin and black, with the tail tips and parts of the tails washed in soft pink and red. The composition is loose and open, with the figures placed diagonally across a pale background.

Fine line Japanese Fox Kanji

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the rice came in late at Hoshino, and every autumn Old Tomé counted the sacks twice, because the foxes had counted them once already. Two of them kept the Inari shrine at the forest's edge. The elder stood tall on her hind legs to reach the lantern hooks, grey at the muzzle and patient as a heron. The younger never walked if she could leap from the torii to the stone lantern and back again.

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The drought came in August. The paddies cracked like old lacquer, and the boys stopped climbing the persimmon trees because the fruit had shrivelled on the branch. Tomé found the vixens arguing in the shrine yard, nine tails apiece lashing, the pink tips bright as sorrel. The elder wanted the last sack sealed in the god's storehouse. The younger wanted it carried down the lane to the Kobayashi children, who had not tasted rice since spring.

Tomé did not ask who would win. He went home and slept badly, and in the morning the storehouse door stood open, the seal unbroken, the sack gone. Down at the Kobayashi gate a bundle lay on the step, tied with a red thread that matched nothing in the village.

The elder came to the shrine that noon and found Tomé sweeping. She looked at the empty hook for a long while. Then she sat, folded her tails about her feet, and said nothing, which for a fox, Tomé had learned, was the same as saying thank you.