Black and grey sketch of a howling wolf head merging into a butterfly wing, with flowing lines and curled swirls, drawn as a tattoo design on plain paper.

Howling wolf with butterfly wing design

Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a wolf's head tilted back in a howl, with one butterfly wing extending from its neck area. Long, flowing lines trail downward and end in a spiral, with small curled swirls scattered along them. The linework is crisp and dark, with soft pencil-like shading on the wolf's head and the inner wing veins, set against a plain white background.

Wolf Howling Swirl Spiral

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mam says I shouldn't write to you while you're in Hamburg, but the post van goes at six and I've nothing else to do after the milking. The wolf came down off the fell again on Tuesday. Mr Pringle swears it was a collie gone wild, but a collie doesn't throw its head back like that, mouth open to the sky, as if it's calling someone who has left the table early.

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Nobody's seen a wolf in this valley since the old king's time, so we've settled on a stray from the travelling fair that pitched at Alnmouth. Dad went up with the lantern on Wednesday and came back with a pale butterfly caught in his collar. Not a moth, a proper butterfly, with one wing torn at the edge. He let it go over the drystone wall, and then he said the wolf had been singing to it, which is the sort of thing he says after two whiskies.

Last night I followed the creature myself, down past the mill race where the water turns in a slow ring around the sluice gate. The ferns on the bank have been pressed flat in curls, as though someone traced them with a finger. The wolf stood there with one wing raised and the other folded tight against its neck, and moonlight came off the water and ran up its jaw in long thin lines. It turned its head. It wasn't looking at me. It was looking at the wing, the way you'd look at a letter you'd been expecting for years.

Dad says the fair left without it. I think it stayed to see who would come looking. Write back soon, and tell me Hamburg has a fell of its own. Your loving sister, Nance.