Black ink drawing of a wolf howling beside a second wolf on a rocky outcrop, with tall pine trees rising behind them.

Howling wolf pair beneath pine trees

Black and grey · Flash

A silhouetted wolf stands with its head raised in a howl, and a second wolf stands beside it on a rocky mound. Tall, sparse pine trees with feathered branches rise behind them, and the ink has run down the page in faint vertical streaks. The image is in black ink and grey wash on pale paper, with solid dark silhouettes and no colour.

Wolf Howling Pine tree Forest Rock

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old wolf had sung from the same grey rock for nine winters, and each winter the valley below answered with nothing but the creak of the pines. Her son, Harl, sat beside her on the cold stone and watched the snow slide down the slope like a slow grey sheet, and he counted the trees the way his mother had taught him, one for each lost pack that had gone down to the lowland farms in the autumn of the sickness and never climbed back.

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He asked her once why she howled at all, when the forest had already heard her. She said the howl was not for the forest. A howl carried further than a name, she said, and if a wolf kept singing from the high rock, the ones who had wandered off could find the way home by the sound of it. Harl thought this foolish, the sort of thing a mother says to a cub who will not sleep.

On the fourth night of the thaw an answer came up through the trees, thin and cracked, then another from further off, then a third from the far side of the river. They climbed the path one at a time, ribs showing, fur matted with mud, and stood at the foot of the rock with their heads low and their tails still.

The old wolf stopped singing. She lay down on the stones and let her son take the howl. His voice was rougher than hers, but it carried just as far, and below them the rain ran down the bare trunks in long dark lines while the pines held out their branches as if they were counting.