Colour realism tattoo of a fox with feathered wings among green leaves and branches, running across a person's back and ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged fox among branches across back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo shows a fox with feathered wings perched on a branch, with its tail sweeping down the ribs. Leaves and thin branches surround the animal, and the wings are drawn with fine feather detail. Soft colour shading in oranges, greens and greys gives the composition a painterly, layered look across two side-by-side photographs.

Realism Botanical Back Ribs Fox Wing Feather Leaves Branches Tree Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pellow wanted the fox to fly by the second week of the season, which was his way of asking for the impossible in a waistcoat. I had the sign-board across two trestles behind the dodgem tent, a jar of rust ochre, and a crow's wing the cook had pulled from the bin because she said I'd want the pinions. Nobody on the fair had ever seen a fox that wasn't a stuffed thing in a glass case, so I started with the tail.

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I painted the branch first, a long grey limb of ash, and dabbed on the leaves with a sponge, greens going to yellow wherever the lamps caught them. The fox came after. Each night, when the generator coughed itself quiet and the midway went dark, I sat under one lantern and did the feathers a barb at a time: black at the tips, then a bloom of grey, then a pale line like frost on a gate. Pellow came by at midnight with his tin of cold tea and said it looked like a fox that had been talked into something. I told him it was waiting for the wind.

On the last night before we struck the fair, the fox's head had turned toward the hedgerow beyond the field gate. I was certain I'd painted it facing the crowds, and I hadn't touched it since Thursday. Pellow wanted the board left behind to cover the field rent, so we nailed it to the back of a hay barn and drove on before dawn.

In March I walked back that way. The board had gone silver with weather, but two feathers had come loose from the lower edge and lay in the wet grass, orange at their tips. Above them, the ash had put out its first green leaves exactly where I'd painted them.