Watercolour-style tattoo of a leaping fox in pink and blue with loose black sketch linework on the shoulder.

Watercolour fox on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A fox is shown mid-leap, drawn with loose, sketchy black outlines. Its body and tail are filled with pink and blue washes that bleed outwards into splashes of the same colours across the skin. The tattoo sits on a soft, light-skinned shoulder, with the animal's body curving down and across the frame.

Shoulder Fox Watercolour splashes Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Maren kept her vats behind the house at Hollin Ford, where the river bent round the salt marsh. She had madder for red and woad for blue, and a third vat under a slate lid that she would not open in front of anyone, because it held the colour of evening, boiled down from river clay and crushed mussel shell. The fox had watched her for a whole season before it came.

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It came in the thin part of autumn, when the reeds had gone the colour of old bread. Maren woke to a sound like someone splashing in the yard and found the slate lid pushed aside and a fox standing on the rim of the vat, its forepaws dripping pink. It looked at her the way a neighbour looks at a badly laid hedge. Then it leapt, and where its belly crossed the air the colour went with it, streaking up over the roof in ribbons that bled into the dark like wine spilt on linen.

For three nights the sky over Hollin Ford stayed pink at the edges and blue beneath, and the marsh folk said the fox had carried the evening away over the hills. Maren went after it with a basket and a hazel stick. She found it on the third morning asleep in the crook of a fallen ash, its tail wrapped round its nose, the wet colour still soaking into its fur. She stood a long while, then turned and walked home without the stick.

The vat was never refilled. Some said the fox had settled a debt owed to the sky, and that what it carried was the price of one morning's light. Maren kept the slate lid on and left a bowl of milk on the step each evening, and in the autumns after that the sunsets over the marsh were always a little bolder than they had any right to be.