Black linework tattoo design of a wolf howling skywards, drawn in a bold tribal style on a white background.

Howling wolf tribal design

Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a wolf with its head raised and jaw open, howling upwards, with its body curving down to a long, sweeping tail. It is drawn in solid black tapering strokes and flame-like spikes, with small dots marking the eye, ear and nose. The image is a plain black-on-white drawing with no shading, colour or background detail.

Wolf Howling wolf Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the bells of St Cuthbert's, Mrs Ada Penhallow kneaded dough in the back room of her shop on Tanner Lane, and every morning at the hour before first light a grey wolf came down off the moor and sat in the road beneath her window. It did not beg. It sat with its nose to the sky and waited, the way a man waits for a kettle.

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The village said the wolf had once been a miller's son who wanted out of his father's trade. Ada did not believe that. She believed in bread. One morning she opened the door with a loaf still hot in a flour sack and set it on the step. The wolf looked at the bread, then at the grey line creeping over the fells, and it lifted its head and howled until the shutters along the lane rattled open one by one.

Ada understood then. Each dawn the wolf called the sun up over the ridge, and each dawn the ovens had to be lit to meet it. When the howling stopped, the bread was ready and the lane woke to the smell of it. She stopped scolding the beast for waking the children and started rising earlier to meet it. Some mornings she stepped out in her apron and howled back, badly, and the wolf seemed to think this very fine.

When Ada died in a hard winter, the wolf did not come down for three mornings. On the fourth, the new baker, a boy from the coast who could not carry a tune, stood on the step in the dark with a loaf in his hands and no notion what to do. The wolf came down anyway, sat in the road, and waited. The boy opened his mouth, and the sky began to pale over the fells.