Solid black silhouette tattoo of a canine with its head raised and tail lifted, placed on the upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Black canine silhouette on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a solid black silhouette of a four-legged canine, possibly a wolf or fox, with its head tilted up and its tail extended. The edges are smooth and the fill is dense with slight texture, and there is no shading or additional detail. The photograph is taken close up, with the figure sitting near the shoulder blade against pale skin and a pale green curtain in the background.

Back Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the brother who keeps the bell at Saint Aldric's, which means you climb the tower every dusk and every dawn to pull the rope, and so you are the first to hear the wolf. It arrives in February, when the snow has crusted over the water meadows and the nearest farm has lost two ewes. Brother Osric says it is only a fox with ideas above its station. You know better. A fox does not stand at the foot of the tower with its head thrown back and sing.

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The abbot forbids the hunt. He says the animal has as much right to the hillside as the pilgrims who climb it, and that the bell has never once frightened a wolf away. So you take to bringing it scraps from the refectory in a cloth bag, leaving them on the flat stone by the lower gate, and you find that it waits for you each evening, black against the white wall, its tail stretched out straight as a plumb line, watching you without coming closer.

On the feast of the Purification the wind drops suddenly and the whole valley goes silent. You hear it before you see it, a long rising note that climbs past the bell's own hum. You answer it. You do not know why you do it; you only open your mouth and call back, badly, out of tune, and across the frozen fields the thing lifts its narrow head and answers you again.

When the brothers file out to Lauds next morning, the cloth bag lies folded on the stone, empty and licked clean, and in the snow beside it are four long prints that lead up the hill and do not come back down.