Black ink splatter drawing of a snarling wolf's face with bared teeth and narrowed eyes on a white background.

Snarling wolf head in ink splatter

Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head is shown face on, with its eyes narrowed, nose wrinkled and teeth bared. The fur and features are built from loose, gestural brushstrokes and scattered ink drops rather than clean outlines. The image is rendered entirely in black ink on white, with the wolf's ears fading into the top of the page.

Wolf Animal Snarl Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink went over in the third watch, when the Margaret Dunne was standing on her ear off the Faroes and nobody had slept since Tuesday. Jem was the one who sponged it up, swearing at the pitch of the deck, but the stain on the chart would not lift. By dawn it had made itself into a face. The eyes were narrowed to slits, the nose was wrinkled up over the teeth, and the fur ran off the edges of the paper into the margin, where the ears went thin and grey as weather.

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The mate wanted it burned. The cook said a thing that sits that square on a chart will sit square on a ship, and he would have no more of it near the bread. Captain Harrow only looked at the page for a long while and then said to leave it be, because the bilge rats had gone quiet since the gale and he liked a quiet hold. Nobody saw anything move. But when Jem came down at night to fetch the lamp, the snarl on the paper seemed sharper than it had been at supper, and the lamp smelled of wet dog.

They made Leith on a Thursday with the wind behind them. Before the crew went ashore, Jem cut the chart from the table, wrapped it in oilcloth, and nailed it up over the galley hatch where the stores were kept. The next voyage the biscuit barrels stayed whole and the cat was never seen below decks again. Anyone who came up the ladder for a heel of bread found the wolf watching from the wall, teeth bared, as if it had counted them.