Black hand-drawn lettering reading BAD WOLF, with the W and O linked together, tattooed on the upper back in a fine, loose lettering style.

Bad Wolf lettering on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the words BAD WOLF in black, hand-drawn letters with uneven, slightly slanted strokes. The W and O are joined and the letters are placed at different angles, with the L and F rising up towards the top right of the frame. The ink is solid black on pale skin, shown in a close, slightly soft-focus crop with no visible shading.

Lettering Back Wolf Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the ladle still, boy, and listen, because I'll only tell it once and the stew won't wait. The barge was called Bad Wolf, and her name was painted on the bow by a skipper called Amos Tully, who wrote letters like a drunk spider falling down stairs. Folk on the Humber said the name would curse her. Amos laughed and said a wolf only goes bad when it goes hungry, and he'd never let his crew go hungry.

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That winter the ice came down thick over the Trent and the coal ran short. Amos had a temper like a dropped anvil. He shouted at the lock-keepers, he shouted at the mate, and one night he hurled the bread tin over the side because the flour had weevils in it. The crew went quiet. I was the cook then, a thin lad from Hull with flour up to my elbows, and I thought, that man is hungry for something he can't name.

So I baked him a loaf with a scorched crust and a wedge of cheese pressed into the middle, and I left it on the hatch with a note in my worst handwriting: Eat it before it cools, you bad old wolf. He read it by the lamp. He didn't speak for a day. Then he came down to the galley, sat on the coal bucket, and ate every crumb while the mate watched through the hatch with his mouth hanging open.

The paint on her bow is gone now, scraped off when they broke her up at Thorne. But I still hear that name said in the pubs, and every time somebody laughs and says the wolf was only ever hungry. Mind your fingers on that knife, boy. Hunger wears a friendly face, same as any other beast.