Watercolour-style tattoo of a white fox silhouette sitting against pink, orange, blue and purple splashes, on the side of the ribs.

Watercolour fox silhouette on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A sitting fox is shown as a solid white silhouette, with its head raised and tail curled around its body. Behind it, soft watercolour-like splashes in pink, orange, blue, teal and purple spread outwards, with fine black speckles scattered around the edges. The image is a close, slightly angled photo of the skin on the side of the torso, with the fox centred in the frame.

Ribs Fox Silhouette Watercolour Splash Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs men at Harrowdale stone had been arguing with the sheep for three hundred years, and in all that time nobody had seen the fox come down off the hill. It came the autumn Hepzibah Lunn began carrying bolts of dyed wool across the border at night. It sat on the wall in the dusk with its head up and its tail curled round its feet, and it watched the road the way a clerk watches a ledger.

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Hepzibah had a cart, two sons who had gone to the mills, and a debt to the man in the grey house on the far side. She had three bolts of cloth she would not be able to sell on her own side without paying the duty twice. Tobias Ferrier came down the lane with his lantern and his tally book and found her stopped by the stone, her hands shaking on the reins. He asked her what was in the cart. She said wool. He asked her why she had stopped. She said the fox had stopped her.

Tobias looked at the wall and there was the fox, white as a candle, with the lantern light running over it. Then it stood, shook itself, and the dye in the cloth bled into the air around it, pink and orange and a deep teal, violet at the edges, and black specks like sparks off a dying fire. Tobias said afterwards that he could not tell where the colour stopped and the night began. The fox went over the wall without a sound, and Hepzibah drove her cart on into the grey house's yard, duty unpaid, debt cleared.

The river ran blue for a week after that. Tobias went out with his tally book and found only speckles of dye on the wall stones and no duty owing. Every dyer in Harrowdale has kept a bowl of that blue on the sill since, and nobody has ever asked which side of the wall the fox lives on.