Black and grey realism tattoo of a howling wolf beneath a full moon with a skull shape, pine trees and rocks, shown on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Howling wolf and skull moon on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf sits on a rocky ledge with its head raised in a howl, beneath a large full moon whose shading forms a skull. Pine trees and a bare tree stand in silhouette on the left and right, with grass at the base. The shading is soft and smooth in grey and black, with a faint brown wash in the sky and rock, and the three views show the same piece from different angles.

Realism Forearm Wolf Moon Skull Pine tree Bare tree Forest Rock Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reeve of Caddow Vale had counted his sheep twice that autumn, and both times the flock came up one short. So at dusk he took a lantern and his bad temper up the fell, past the black pines and the oak that had been dead since his grandfather's day, until the grass gave way to a shelf of grey rock.

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A wolf sat on the ledge with its head thrown back. It was not eating anything. It had no lamb in its jaws and no blood on its muzzle, only a long throat lifted toward a moon so full it looked like a plate of old bone. The old women of Caddow said the moon kept a skull for every soul it had taken, and that the craters on its face were the marks of teeth. The reeve watched the shadows shift, the pale sockets settle, and a grin come out of the light.

He did not raise his gun. He sat down on the cold stone and waited, and the wolf howled until the grass lay flat and the oak creaked on its roots. Somewhere below, a dog answered from the valley. It was his own dog, Tam, who had gone missing the same week as the lamb and had never come home. The wolf turned its head, looked at the reeve with eyes like wet coins, and went down the far side without a sound.

At first light the reeve walked down with the flock counted, every one of them, and Tam asleep on the threshold with a grey tuft caught in his collar. The moon hung on in the west, thin as a fingernail and still grinning. The reeve never went up the fell again, but he set a bowl of milk on the wall each night, and no more sheep were lost from Caddow Vale.