Black and grey realistic tattoo of a snarling wolf head with bared teeth and light eyes, on a shoulder.

Snarling wolf head on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf head, shown in profile with its mouth open and teeth bared, fills the frame. The fur is built up with soft, layered grey shading and fine dark strokes, and the eyes are picked out with pale highlights. The wolf sits on smooth skin against a black background, with the tattoo's edges fading into the surrounding fur.

Realism Shoulder Wolf Animal Snarl Fur

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ewes had been counted twice before the wolf came down off the ridge, and Edith Parr counted them a third time by lantern light, touching each woolly back as she went. Thirty-one. The snow lay blue on the wall of Hob's Field and the pines above the village stood black against a sky with no moon in it. She heard it before she saw it: not a howl but a long breath, like a bellows let out slowly. Then a grey shape came along the top of the wall, low and deliberate, and stopped in the lantern's reach. Its mouth was open. Its eyes were the pale colour of frost on a gatepost.

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Tom Harrow came running with his father's old fowling piece and a shout ready in his throat. Edith put her arm out. 'Leave it,' she said. 'It's not come for the flock.' Tom laughed at her, but the wolf turned its head and looked at the gap in the wall where the lambs were pulled in each night, and then it looked at Edith, and Tom lowered the gun without being told twice. Nobody in Coldharbour had ever seen a wolf close enough to be looked at. The men stood in a line with their lanterns, and the wolf stood on the wall, and for the length of a long cold count nothing moved except the smoke from their breath.

At dawn one lamb was gone, the runt with the notched ear, and a single trail of prints led back up into the pines. The rest of the flock was safe, the gate still latched with its iron pin. Old Mrs Pym said the forest had taken its due, the way it always did when a village grew greedy at its edge. Edith did not argue. She found a grey hair caught on the wall stone, long and coarse, and she twisted it into a loop of red wool and hung it on the gatepost where the wind could take it.

Every winter after, when the snow came early, she counted the ewes three times and left the gap in the wall unlatched. The lambs were always the right number in spring. Nobody in Coldharbour asked her how she knew which one was owed, and she never told them that the wolf had looked at her as though she were the one who owed it.