Watercolour-style tattoo of a fox in orange and red tones with splashes of paint, on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour fox on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A fox walks low to the ground, facing left, with its tail trailing upwards into loose, splashed strokes of orange and red. The linework is soft and mostly absent, with the form built from wet-looking blends of colour, and darker brown-black touches on the nose, ears and legs. The fox sits centrally on a pale upper back, with the neck and bra straps visible at the edges of the frame.

Back Fox Splash Animal Watercolour

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

It rained on the Thornmarket for three days, and on the third the fox came up Tanner's Lane at the hour the stalls were shutting. Nobody saw it arrive. Ada Pell, who sold thread from a barrow by the pump, noticed the colour first: a smear of rust running under the awnings, as if someone had spilt a dye pot and the water had carried it along the gutters.

Keep reading

The fox walked low, the way foxes walk when they know the dogs are indoors. It stopped at each stall and looked at what was left. At the baker's it turned its head toward the crusts. At the cobbler's it sniffed a boot. Its tail lifted behind it and shook, and the drops that came off did not fall straight down but spread into bright splashes on the flagstones, orange and red, like the marks a child makes when it paints too wet.

Ada followed it to the corner where the bell hangs over the old well. She had a spool of red silk in her apron, the last of her good thread, and she did not know why she unwound a length of it. The fox stopped. It looked at her with its ears flat, and then it took the silk end gently in its teeth, the way a cat carries a kitten, and trotted off into the rain with the line running out behind it.

Next morning the stallholders found the cobbles stained in a single line from the well to the gate, and wherever the silk had touched, a small fox-coloured flame stayed on the stone. Ada never sold thread again. She said she had nothing left to sell that the fox had not already taken. The rain kept coming, and the line of colour lasted until spring, when the carters scrubbed it away without thinking twice.