>  is there any way to dictate which UTXO the fees come from?

Some wallets have a feature named ["coin control"](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/37486/13866).

The fee is simply the difference between input amount and output amount. There is no correspondence between individual inputs and individual outputs when there are multiple of either - the notion of fees coming from one or other input simply has no meaning in the Bitcoin network. 

The Ordinals project makes an arbitrary assignment according to its own off-chain rules. This is based on the ordering of inputs and outputs in the transaction - but this order has no meaning in the Bitcoin network and can be random.