Black and grey traditional full arm sleeve with a wolf head, a headdress face, a woman's portrait, a snake and roses, placed on the forearm and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional black and grey arm sleeve

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve in traditional style shows a wolf's head, a face wearing a feathered headdress with an eye motif, a woman's portrait, a snake coiled around the forearm and several roses. The work uses bold black outlines with grey and black shading, and includes stars, a crescent moon and the words THIS WAY in the design. The photograph is taken from the front, showing both arms with the sleeves filling most of the frame against a grey shirt.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Wolf Headdress Woman Snake Rose Star Moon Eye Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last wagon of Pell's Travelling Wonders lost its wheel in a ditch outside Ashby, and nobody came to lift it. Old Ezra sat on the tailboard with the sign that had led crowds up the lane for forty years across his knees. THIS WAY, it read, in letters someone had painted when his father was young, and the paint had worn to the colour of weak tea.

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Inside the wagon the animals were quiet. The wolf had been sold to a farm in Lincolnshire in the spring, but its old cage still held the smell of it, and the snake, Judith, lay coiled in a biscuit tin with the lid off, too tired to lift her head. Ezra had kept the headdress from the Chief, a man called Walter Crane who had ridden the sawdust for thirty years before going home to Leeds. It was folded in tissue, a single green feather still standing at the tip, and the painted eye on the feathers had faded to a grey squint.

On the last night, a girl from the village walked up the lane holding a lantern. She had come to ask whether the show would return next summer, and Ezra told her he didn't know. She looked at the painted woman on the side of the wagon, the fortune teller with the star-spangled scarf and the moon on her brow, and asked if the woman had been real. He said she had been real once, and had read palms for a penny and never once been wrong about who would leave.

The girl said she would come back in summer anyway. Ezra nodded, lifted the sign, and turned it so it pointed the way the road went. In the morning the wheel was still in the ditch, but the sign was gone, and the lane was full of footprints heading towards the town.