Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two small fox tattoos on skin

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two small fox tattoos sit on skin, one above the other in the frame. The upper fox is a solid black silhouette running left, while the lower fox is drawn as a single black outline with no shading, running right. Both are in black ink only, on a plain skin background with the two designs kept small and separated.

Fine line Forearm Fox Animal Silhouette Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Sister Hild, the rain has got into the lamp-black again, so forgive the blots. Prior Osric found two foxes in the margin of the Gospel book this morning and asked who had been drawing vermin in the Word of God. I said nothing. Wenna drew them, though she is not to blame for the shape of them. The boy who brings the eels to the kitchen door had described the fox that crossed the mill-leat at dusk, and she drew it the way he told it, a black thing against the water, all shadow and no inside.

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Brother Tobiah, who copies the psalter in the north cell, did not like that. He said a fox should be drawn as the Lord made it, with belly, legs and clear edges, so he took his pen and gave the second fox a line for every hair. Osric stood between their two desks for a long while. Then he asked Wenna which of the foxes was running away from the other. She said neither. They were both running towards the gutter, where the margin ends and the page is only parchment.

I have thought about that answer since. The shadow fox has no edges to speak of, so you cannot tell where the dark stops and the vellum begins. The drawn fox is all edges and nothing inside, so you can see straight through it to the wall. Between them they have made one whole animal, and neither would be whole alone.

Osric has let them stay. He said the margins are the only place the book admits what it does not know. I am sending a copy of the page, traced twice on a clean sheet, so you may see them for yourself. Pray for the mill-leat, and for my eyes.