Close-up of the words bad wolf in small lowercase serif lettering in pale grey ink on the side of a torso.

Small lettering reading bad wolf on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of the words bad wolf tattooed in small, lowercase, serif lettering on pale skin. The ink is faint and greyish, with fine, even linework and a plain, uncluttered layout. The soft, out-of-focus background shows a little of the body's curve and a hint of colour at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Ribs Text Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dora Heslop had typed the same telegram four times before the lamp room clock struck six, and each time the e in the middle of the word refused to sit straight on the office typewriter. The ribbon was worn and the carriage stuck, so every message out of Ashby Colliery came out faint and grey, like breath on a window. The slip in front of her held only two words, scrawled by Joe Varley at the pit head with a stub of carpenter's pencil: bad wolf, found by the lamp cabin.

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Everybody in Ashby knew the dog. It was a lean grey mongrel that had run with the night shift for three winters, stealing pasties from tin boxes and sleeping in the warm lee of the boiler house. The men called it Bad Wolf because it got into everything and was never once punished for it. Nobody had owned it. Nobody had needed to.

She rolled a clean sheet in and typed the name, then stopped. The telegram was for the Pensioners' Fund, which kept a ledger of animals that had worked the pit and wanted them recorded for the memorial board. The clerk in Newcastle would want a date and a cause, and Dora had neither. Instead she wrote, in small even letters, that the wolf had last been seen going down the drift road towards the old headings, and that the shift had left its tin of scraps out for it.

When she finally pulled the sheet free, the ribbon had printed the words so faintly they looked pressed into skin. She folded the telegram into her apron pocket and walked out past the lamp cabin. In the coal dust by the step there were four small prints heading the wrong way, back up towards the village, and beside them the tin lid, licked clean and set neatly on its edge.