Black ink drawing of a howling wolf beneath a curling ribbon banner with hymn lyrics, in a dotwork and lettering style, shown as a flash design rather than on skin.

Howling wolf with hymn banner design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing shows a wolf with its head tilted back and muzzle raised in a howl, its fur and face filled with fine dots, swirls and patterned stippling. Three ribbon scrolls above it carry hymn lyrics in cursive script, with the top banner reading All Creatures of our God and King. The work is in black ink on a pale cream background with no colour, and the composition places the wolf in the lower right with the banners arching across the upper left.

Dotwork Lettering Wolf Howling wolf Scroll Script Lyric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brothers of Saint Eadric's had sung Vespers at the edge of the fen for three hundred years, and for most of that time the wolves had listened from the reeds. Brother Aldous did not like it. He said a wolf that sat still through the Magnificat was a wolf planning its supper, and he kept a spear by the chapel door for that reason.

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One dusk in the thaw he went out with the lantern and the spear and found the pack already sitting in a ring on the frozen mere. The grey bitch at the front lifted her muzzle towards him, and he stopped, because she was not growling. She was waiting, the way the old abbot waited for the cantor to take up the line.

He went back in without a word. At Vespers he gave out the first verse, and before the brothers had finished it the wolves answered from the reeds, one voice after another, climbing the notes as if they had learnt the chant by heart from the outside of the walls. Aldous felt his own throat go tight. All creatures of our God and King, the brothers sang, and the fen gave back a deeper voice beneath them.

Afterwards the abbot asked why the cantor had come in with his spear still in his hand and his face wet. Aldous said nothing for a long while. Then he hung the spear on its peg, took up the book, and called the next verse louder, so that anyone out on the ice could hear exactly where the hymn was going.