Front-facing grey wolf head drawn in soft wash shading, with stippled dots fading out at the edges on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey wolf head with dotted edges

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing wolf head with pale eyes and a dark nose, drawn in soft grey washes. The edges of the head and neck dissolve into scattered dots, while the eyes and nose hold the most defined detail. The subject sits centred on a plain white background with generous empty space around it.

Dotwork Wolf Animal Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had been bunched against the dyke below Cnoc Ruadh since noon, and I knew before I reached the gate that something was walking the fence line on the far side of them. Snow was coming in sideways off the Minch, thin as flour, and at first I took the animal for a grey stone until it lifted its head and I saw the pale eyes.

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It was a wolf, or the shape of one. The grey of its coat ran into the white until I could not say where the animal stopped and the weather began, and where its ruff should have been the outline broke into a scatter of dark specks that drifted off like starlings. My grandfather used to say the last wolf on Ardvule was shot in the winter of 1743 by a factor's man who was paid in cattle. He said the animal had come down to the shore to look at the boats, and that the island went quiet for a month afterwards.

I did not shout. I went back to the house, filled the iron bucket with the meal my brother kept for the calves, and set it at the gate with the latch lifted. Morning came clean and blue. The bucket lay on its side, licked empty, and the prints in the drift went down to the shingle and stopped, as if the animal had stepped off the edge of the world or into the flurry of its own breath.

I counted the ewes at breakfast, three times, and the number came out right. Donald asked if I had seen anything, and I told him only the snow. That evening I left the gate open again and stood at the window until the last grey light went out of the hill, and I am still standing there in my mind, watching for two pale eyes to come up out of the white.