Fox Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a fox tattoo means

A fox is cleverness without power. It is a middle-sized hunter that bigger animals hunt, so it survives by noticing more, moving first and never fighting fair, and the fables that made it a trickster were really admiring that. People who wear one usually mean some version of it: getting by on wit in a place built for someone stronger, or knowing when to leave.

The trickster has a darker edge. Reynard, the fox of the medieval beast epics, lies, steals and talks his way off the gallows, and in the Christian bestiaries the fox plays dead to catch the birds that come to peck at it, which made it an image of the devil. English slang adds a reading of its own, since foxy and vixen describe attractive women, and some strangers will reach for that one first, whatever was meant.

Japan gives the fox a sacred job. Kitsune are the messengers of Inari, the kami of rice and prosperity, and the stone foxes at Inari shrines hold a key, a jewel or a sheaf of rice in their mouths. A kitsune grows another tail as it ages and gains power, and nine is the most any fox has, so the nine-tailed fox drawn in the irezumi manner here is the oldest and strongest of them. Folklore divides kitsune into benevolent and mischievous foxes. The Korean kumiho, also nine-tailed, is usually a predator in disguise.

The kindest reading is modern and French. In Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, published in 1943, the fox asks to be tamed, and taming means making ties: the prince becomes responsible for it, and the fox tells him that what is essential is invisible to the eye. Wearers who mean friendship are quoting that fox, and the French line, l'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux, is often inked beside it.

Where the design comes from

The clever fox is as old as Greek literature. Archilochus, in the seventh century BC, wrote that the fox knows many things but the hedgehog one big thing, a line Isaiah Berlin borrowed in 1953, and Aesop's fox called the grapes it could not reach sour. The French Roman de Renart, from the late twelfth century, was so popular that renard replaced goupil as the ordinary word for the animal, and William Caxton printed The History of Reynard the Fox in 1481. In Japan, Hiroshige's print of 1857 shows foxes gathering at Ōji on New Year's Eve, each beside a small flame of foxfire.

Choosing yours

• Get the markings right and the animal identifies itself. A red fox has black stockings, black backs to its ears, a white chest and a white tip to a brush more than half the length of its body, and its pupils are vertical slits like a cat's. Without them a fox in black and grey becomes a small wolf; the blackwork silhouette here keeps the white chest and tail tip for that reason.
• Decide which fox. The fennec, with enormous ears that shed desert heat, and the Arctic fox, white in winter with small rounded ears, are different outlines, and a kitsune is a separate subject: settle the number of tails first, since each is a large shape that has to fan out.
• The pose sets the placement. A fox curled asleep is a compact circle, one of the few animal poses that fits a round field; the leap and the pounce, like the mousing dive in the sketch here, are long diagonals.

Common questions