Black and grey ornamental design of a snarling wolf head filled with mandala-style patterns and dotwork, set within a scrolled border.

Ornamental wolf head with scrollwork frame

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A snarling wolf head faces the viewer, with open jaws, bared fangs and a heavily ornamented face made of mandala-like panels, scales and rows of dots. The fine linework and stippled dotwork build up dense pattern across the head, with solid black areas giving contrast. The head sits centrally inside a square border of black scrollwork, with a plain white circle behind it.

Blackwork Dotwork Wolf Mandala Ornamental Scrollwork Dot Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf on the gate at Hollin Crossing had been snarling at the customs shed since before my father's time, and the paint had long since worn off its fangs. Nobody else at the post bothered with it. On slow nights I counted its dots by the light of the stove, and I never once got the same total twice, though I was sure of the number in the ledger, four hundred and eleven.

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Prit came over the top road in the last week of February with a handcart and a box lashed with wire. His papers were in order, which made me suspicious, because Prit's papers were never in order. He stood in the snow and waited while I turned the box over in my hands. It was heavier than a box of lace should be, and it smelled of camphor and cold iron.

I made him open it. Inside, folded in tissue, was a veil of black thread so fine it moved when I breathed on it. The rosettes were the same as the ones on the gate, panels of scales, rows of tiny dots, and at the centre a jaw spread wide enough to swallow a thumb. Prit said the old lacemaker in the lower valley had died in autumn, and the girl who was to be married in April had nothing to wear but a ribbon, and the whole village had agreed that a bride without a wolf in her veil would be unlucky for the rest of her life.

I did not declare it as lace. I wrote ribbon, uncut, in the ledger, and beside the duty column I wrote the number four hundred and eleven. In the morning there was a fresh spill of frost in the wolf's open mouth, and I went out to count the dots again, and this time I stopped before I reached the end.