Black and grey pencil design of symmetrical blackletter-style lettering with four wolf heads and flowing ornamental lines, drawn as a flash design for a tattoo.

Symmetrical blackletter lettering with four wolf heads

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design built around blackletter-style lettering, with a tall central column of letters flanked by four wolf heads in profile, two at the top and two at the lower sides. Fine hatched and stippled pencil or ink lines shade the letterforms and the wolves, and long curling flourishes trail downward and outward. The design is drawn in black and grey on a plain pale background, with the composition arranged evenly around the vertical centre line.

Lettering Wolf Blackletter Lettering Flourish Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lantern, it has a temper. Four wolves came down off the fell the winter the fair stopped at Harrowgate, and they did not come for the sheep. They came for the names. Every name in the town was written in the mill clerk's ledger, Ambrose Tull's ledger, in letters so black and spiky you could cut a thumb on them.

Keep reading

Tull had a daughter called Edie, who could read the old letters the way other girls read weather. When the wolves sat at the four corners of the square with their heads turned to the centre, she saw that their ears made the same shape as the capitals over the mill door, and that if you drew a line straight down the middle of the town, everything matched on either side. The wolves above howled the top line of the sign until the chapel glass cracked, and the ones below took up the bottom line, low and patient, like men counting coins.

Edie walked down the central column of the ledger, past the curling flourishes that trailed like river weed to the water, and she read the names backwards so the wolves could hear them. One by one the wolves lowered their heads. Every name they were owed went back into the ink. But the last wolf sat still, because it wanted the one name nobody had ever written down, and that was hers.

So Edie wrote it herself, in mirror script, so it could only be read from the far side of the page. That is why the ledger still reads the same from both ends, and why, if you go down to the river at dusk, you will find four wolves drinking, and none of them will tell you whose name they are keeping. Now, who wants to hear about the bear?