Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a red wolf head with orange eyes, a dagger and a beaded pendant, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red wolf head with dagger on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A snarling red wolf head with orange eyes and bared teeth fills the forearm, with a dagger and an ornate orange hilt above it. A pendant with an inverted cross hangs from a beaded chain across the wolf's brow. Bold black outlines, solid red and orange fills and grey shading give it a bright, heavy look, shown in two close photographs.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Wolf Dagger Pendant Bead Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down off the moor the night the Tessaly struck the Gannet Rocks, and Ada Penhallow was the only one at the lamp to see its eyes catch the beam. It stood at the foot of the tower with its red coat steaming in the rain, and it did not bark or run. It only waited, as if it had been sent to fetch her.

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Her father had sworn the old oath at the kitchen table years before, one hand on the dagger with its orange-gilt hilt and the other on the beaded chain that hung a brass disc stamped with a cross turned upside down. The wreckers of Scarrow Head had passed that token from hand to hand for a hundred years, and Jory Penhallow had told her it kept the sea honest. Ada had never believed a word of it, and she had never been able to throw the chain out either.

She climbed the iron stair with the wolf at her heels, oil slopping from the can, and at the top the flame was guttering low behind its glass. Out past the reef a row of false lanterns swung on the rocks where her father's friends had hung them, pulling the Tessaly toward the teeth. Ada wound the wick up until the lamp roared white, the great lens swung its beam round, and the wolf sat on the gallery rail snarling at the dark.

In the morning the gulls were back on the Gannet Rocks and the wolf was gone. The dagger lay on the lamp-room sill, wrapped in bladderwrack, with the brass disc turned the right way up. Ada hung the chain on the nail beside the door, where anyone coming up the stair would see it.