Wolf head tattoo on the upper back, split down the middle with a watercolour splash of colour on the left and ornate black and grey patterning on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Split wolf head on upper back

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A wolf's head is shown face on across the upper back, divided vertically into two halves. The left half is painted in loose watercolour washes of pink, blue, green and yellow, with paint drips running down below the muzzle. The right half is rendered in fine black linework with dense ornamental patterning, shading and small floral motifs.

Back Wolf Wolf head Animal Watercolour Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the village of Harrowdale, the baker Ada Penrose rose before the church bell to riddle the ovens, and every morning the wolf came to the lane while the lamps were still lit. He was two animals stitched down the middle. One side was the colour of the dyer's vats after a wet week, pink and green and a blue like skimmed milk, and when he shook himself the colour ran off him in drips onto the cobbles. The other side was all lace, the fine black work that frost makes on a window, whorls and little flowers pressed into his fur. Ada never asked which side was the true one. She broke the heel off the first loaf and set it on the step, and he took it and went back up the hill.

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One winter the dyer's girl, Maud, came down for yeast and stopped dead at the sight of him. She said he looked like a cloth half finished, and the wolf turned his painted ear towards her as if he had heard it before. Ada said nothing, but that night she left a dish of water with a pinch of madder stirred into it, so the colour would not fade from his one side in the frost.

When the thaw came the wolf did not return. In spring the lace on the bakehouse window melted away, and on the step lay a single drip of paint, yellow as the first crust, hardened like a bead of resin. Ada put it in a tin with the bread knife and the spare keys.

She still bakes two loaves before dawn. One she leaves plain on the step. The other she dusts with flour, pressing the pattern of the frost into the crust with the back of a spoon, and by the time the bell rings the lane is empty and the bread has gone cold.