Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a fox with orange, blue and purple splashes and running drips on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour fox on a thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A fox sits upright in profile, its head turned upwards, rendered in orange, red and touches of white and dark purple. Loose watercolour washes of blue, violet and orange spread around the figure and drip downwards, with the paint edges left soft rather than outlined. The colour is bold and the composition sits on the outer thigh, with the splashes extending beyond the main figure.

Thigh Fox Watercolour Splashes Drip Animal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fox was back on the fish quay when we tied up the Mary Jane at Carrick Bay, sitting bolt upright on the bollard with its nose lifted into the wind as if it were reading the weather off the sky. Dad swore it was the same one that had robbed a crate of mackerel the summer before. I told him all foxes look alike in lamplight, and he told me I had never been any good at seeing what was in front of me.

Keep reading

We were three days out and had little to show for it, the nets coming up heavy with weed and the hold smelling of nothing but diesel. Dad's hands had gone the colour of wet bark from the cold. Each night the fox sat there while we hosed the deck, its coat catching the harbour light, orange as a buoy and bright as paint still tacky on a palette. Where the oil ran down the stone wall beneath it, the colour bled out in long streaks, as though someone had tried to wash the wall and given up halfway.

On the last morning the fox didn't move when Dad climbed out with the gutting knife, so he tossed it a head. It took the head, then came back and sat in the same place, looking not at us but past the breakwater to where the grey of the sea met the grey of the sky. Dad went very still. "It's looking at the bar," he said. Nobody in the fleet had gone out past the bar since the storm took the Kestrel and her crew.

We stayed in. Dad sold the Mary Jane the next spring and bought a canvas chair for the quay, and on wet evenings he sits in it with a flask while the tide turns. The fox has not been seen since, but the rain still runs orange down the wall beside him, where the old stain was never scrubbed away.