Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Howling wolf head design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a wolf's head in profile with its muzzle raised and mouth open in a howl. The design is drawn with bold solid black shapes and sharp, flame-like cuts for the fur, with the white background left open. It is a single-colour black design with no shading or grey tones.

Wolf Wolf head Howling Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the gate, it sticks in frost, and don't you go lifting the latch with bare hands or the iron will take the skin off you. There, that's it. Now come in close to the stove, because this is the winter the wolf came down off the Harrow Fells and sat on the far side of Ashby Beck and howled at the Corrigan farmhouse for nine nights running.

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Old Mary Corrigan had the lambing pens to see to, and her son Tom, who was twelve and thought himself a man, kept his father's shotgun under the stairs and swore he would be the one to end it. Each night the howl came up the valley black as pitch, rising from the chest outward, the throat thrown back and the snow lit silver under the moon. Every dog on the place went silent and crawled under the hay.

On the ninth night Mary took her lantern and walked out past the walls herself. She didn't carry the gun. She sat down on the stone bridge with her boots in the drift and began to howl back, badly, a thin old woman's noise that cracked halfway through. The wolf stopped. Tom came running after with the shotgun held crossways, and he saw the animal standing in the moonlight with its muzzle lifted and its ruff bristling like flames of ink against the white.

Nobody ever agreed what happened next. Tom swore the beast bowed its head before it turned for the fells. Mary only said the flock was counted in the morning and every ewe was there, and that the wolf had simply been calling for its own, the way a person calls out in the dark to say they are still alive.