Black handwritten lettering reading BAD WOLF on the upper back, with a small dot inside the O, in a loose lettering style.

Bad Wolf lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads BAD WOLF in two stacked lines of uneven, hand-drawn capitals in solid black ink. The strokes vary in thickness, the D and F have long tails, and a small dot sits inside the O. The photograph is taken close up on pale skin with a thin metal chain visible at the top right, and the background is dark.

Lettering Back Word Wolf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stone came out of the north wall on a Tuesday, wrapped in yesterday's newspaper, and Dilys Harrow knew before she unwrapped it that someone had cut it on purpose. Two lines of capitals, hacked square into the sandstone. The O had a pinprick of a hole at its heart, and the long F trailed down the face like a sentence nobody had finished. Her foreman wanted it bagged for the county archive. Dilys wanted to know who had been up on that wall in the winter of 1743 with a mason's chisel and something to prove.

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The parish ledger in the damp back room of the council office named the keep's last steward as Thomas Ruddock. He had been paid by the head for every wolf brought down off the Cheviot scarp, and the payments ran out in March. Beside his name, in a hand that shook more with each entry, someone had kept a tally of marks, forty-one strokes grouped in fives, and then nothing. Dilys copied the tally into her notebook and sat with her cold tea until the window turned blue.

At dusk she climbed the wall alone with a torch and fitted the stone back into the gap where it had sat for two centuries. The wind came through the empty arrow slits with a low note, like breath across the mouth of a bottle. Under the lichen on the next block she found a second carving she had missed, shallower, the letters uneven as if cut by a left hand in the dark: the same two words, and beneath them a small wolf's head with its jaw open.

She did not tell the foreman. In the morning the ledger lay open on her desk at Ruddock's page, the tally now running to forty-two, and the newest stroke was still glossy with fresh ink. Dilys closed the book, laid her palm on the cut letters where the stone sat in its crate, and found them warm, though the stone had been in the cold store all night.