Hand-drawn sketch of a wolf head with blue shading, grey pencil hatching and red and teal watercolour splashes on white paper.

Sketched wolf head with watercolour splashes

Mixed · Flash

A wolf's head faces the viewer, drawn with loose pencil hatching and dark ink lines around the fur. The ears, eyes and nose are defined by grey shading, while blue wash covers the upper head and the background is splashed with red and teal paint. The composition is centred on the head, with the splashes spreading out to the lower left and right.

Wolf Animal Sketch Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey thing came down the slip at Skelbrook the morning we were meant to sail short-handed, and nobody on the Good Intent could say whose it was. Old Ansel said it had come off the Brindle boat with the mackerel, which was rubbish, because the Brindle boat had been laid up since Lent. It stood at the end of the pier with its ears flat against the wind and watched us the way a foreman watches a late man.

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We went out anyway. Two days of nothing, then on the third the sea turned the colour of old pewter and the net came up empty three times running. Ansel swore at the gulls. I stood at the rail with a red marker buoy in my hands, the paint still tacky from the yard, and that's when I saw it on the swell, a dark head keeping pace with us a cable off the port quarter. It wasn't swimming, not exactly. It was walking on the water as if the water were a floor it knew well.

It didn't come to us. It turned, the way a dog turns to show you the path, and we followed it east into the teal light off the Scar, where the bottom shoaled and the water rolled up silver. We shot the net there. It came up so heavy the winch groaned and the stern dipped under us, and when the cod slid across the deck like wet coins, the wolf was gone. In its place, on the wheelhouse glass, was a smear of blue, as if someone had pressed a wet thumb to the window and walked off.

Ansel never thanked anything in forty years at sea, but that night he carried a bucket of gurnard heads down to the pier and tipped them on the stones. In the morning they were gone, and the wet stones were printed with tracks too broad for any dog. We shot the net that day and every day after, and never once asked where the fish came from.