Black and grey realism tattoo of an owl, a skull wearing a feathered headdress and a wolf across the shoulder and upper arm.

Owl, skull and wolf on an upper arm

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey piece showing an owl above a skull wearing a feathered headdress, with a wolf's head below the skull. The shading is smooth and detailed, with fine feather texture and dark flame-like swirls framing the design. The design wraps from the shoulder down the upper arm, and a dark bird is partly visible at the top left edge.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Owl Skull Headdress Feather Wolf Flame Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp only lights one face at a time, and I want all of you on my side of it. No, bring the cracked slate too, the one with the wolf scratched on it. Now listen, because the wall-keepers at Harrowmere Crossing still swear the owl was never a bird.

Keep reading

Before the sky went brown, there was a tower of salvaged steel on the north road, and a woman named Oda Ferrier who kept its lamp. Every night she climbed it and every night she saw the same thing: a grey wolf trotting the dead motorway, stopping at each rusted sign as though reading it. The wolf carried nothing. It only looked back at her, and she learned to look back.

One winter the wolf stopped coming. In its place came a drowned skull, washed up in the culvert below the tower, with a headdress of feathers still pinned to it by a bent brass clasp. Oda carried the skull up the tower and set it beside the lamp. She told no one, but the lamp burned brighter that week than it had in ten years, and the owl came, big-eyed and silent, and perched on the rail above the skull as if it had been waiting for someone to bring it home.

Now here is the part the wall-keepers leave out. When the brown sky finally cleared, the wolf came back up the motorway. It sat at the foot of the tower and waited until Oda came down. Then it walked her to the crossing, to the gate that had been locked against strangers for forty years, and it let her through. Nobody has seen the owl since. But on clear nights, if you climb the tower and look north, you will see a pale feather turning slowly in the lamplight, as if someone has just set it down.