Person wearing a black helmet and grey crop top, with traditional-style tattoos covering both arms and hands and a wolf head tattoo on the abdomen.

Heavily tattooed arms and wolf on the abdomen

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A person wearing a black helmet resembling a Darth Vader mask stands against a teal metal wall, with both arms raised and extensively covered in colourful tattoos. The abdomen shows a large greenish wolf head with red-tinged details, surrounded by leaves and flowers, and the forearms and hands carry bold outlined designs including a snake and a face. Strong outlines and saturated colour give the piece a traditional look, and the subject fills most of the frame.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Upper arm Hand Other Wolf Flower Leaves Snake Face Helmet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down from the hill the week the orchard flowered, and Nell Harrow was the only one who did not run from it. She was hanging washing on the line behind the mill when it stepped out of the hawthorns, grey at the muzzle, its eyes the green of pond water under ice. It did not want her washing. It wanted the snake that had been living in the cider press all spring, the long banded thing her father swore would sour every barrel in the valley.

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Her father had nailed a horseshoe over the press door and hung an old iron helm above it, painted with a face to frighten off whatever came in the dark. Nell took the helm down. The paint was flaking and the eyes had worn to bare metal, but the leaves painted round its brim were still bright and curling, and between them ran a row of small white flowers. She set it on the cobbles between herself and the wolf and stepped back.

The snake came out of the press slowly, tasting the air, and the wolf waited with the patience of something that had never once been hurried. Nell understood then that the helm was not meant for the snake. It was a bargain her grandmother had made with the hill, and the painted face was only a reminder to keep it.

When the wolf had taken the snake and gone back up into the hawthorns, Nell scrubbed the press clean and hung the helm over the door again, facing outward, the way it had always been meant to hang. The flowers were already dropping on the step. By June the cider was clear.