Black and grey fine line tattoo of a running wolf pierced by arrows, with the words WINTER IS COMIN beneath it, on the calf.

Running wolf with arrows and lettering on a calf

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf runs to the left with its head raised, surrounded by several arrows that point outwards from its body. Thin outlines and stippled shading give the animal its form, and the shading is mostly dark ink with grey tones. Small capital lettering runs along the lower edge of the design, and the photograph is taken outdoors against a pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The supply boat hadn't come since the first gale of November, and by the third week of December I had counted the paraffin twice. Skerrow light had enough wick to see us to March if I was careful, and I was careful. My father used to say the sea never came for the lighthouse. It came for the keeper who stopped looking at it. So I wound the clockwork at dusk, as he had, and watched the great lens turn its slow brass wheel over the water.

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The wolf came on the ninth night, though there hadn't been wolves on this coast for four hundred years, according to the parish book. It came over the causeway at a run, grey as the rock, head raised, and stopped at the foot of the tower to look up at the light the way a man looks at a fire after a long time in the cold. I took the lantern down. Its ribs showed through its coat like the spokes of an umbrella left open in the wind.

I fed it what was left of the salt fish and it ate with its eyes on the lamp room door. After that it ran the causeway and back each night, and each night the beam swept across the water and the wolf's shadow shot ahead of it over the wet stones, thin and sharp as an arrow. On the twentieth, a fishing boat with a dead engine came out of the sleet and steered by that light until it found the harbour mouth, and its skipper stood on the quay afterwards shaking my hand and not letting go.

When the supply boat finally came in January, the mate asked whose dog that was. I said it had come to keep an eye on the light. He laughed, looked up at the lamp room, then back at the wolf, and didn't laugh again. I still trim the wick every evening. The wolf sleeps at the foot of the stairs, and when the beam goes round it lifts its head and watches the light leave and come back, as if it has been told to keep count.

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