Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal howling wolf head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black ink drawing of a wolf's head in profile, with its jaws open as if howling. The wolf is built from heavy solid black shapes and sweeping tribal-style cutaways, with a spiral detail on the cheek and white negative space outlining the features. The image is in black and grey on a plain white background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Wolf Howling wolf Tribal Spiral Animal Wolf head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down off the tops the winter the water got into Harrow Pit, and it did not go for the sheep. It sat at the head of the shaft with its nose to the cold coming up the rope, the way old Tobias Hand's dog used to sit when a man was late off shift. Nobody in Caldew Hollin liked to say what that meant, so the women put the kettles on and the men stood about in their caps.

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Each night at the change of shift it lifted its head and howled, long and bent at the top like a bellows going wrong. Overman Ezra Pell said it was counting the men below. He would not send the cage down while it sang, and the company man in the good coat wrote this in his book and said nothing else. Eleven were below when the roof came in at the four-hundred level. The company said the air road was sealed. Nobody had the heart to argue at the pit head.

On the fourth night Nan Teague, who swept the lamp room and was the only one not afraid of the animal, took a tin of pease pudding and a lamp up the spoil heap. The wolf did not run. It walked ahead of her down the far side, stopping every few yards to look back, until they came to a crack in the hillside where cold air breathed out like something asleep. She put her hand in it and felt the draught.

She ran for Ezra. They cleared the rubble by morning, and the eleven were found sitting against the wall of the old air road, their lamps turned low, tapping on the rock to keep time with each other. Ezra said afterwards the wolf had gone back up to the tops before the first man came through the gap. Nan still leaves a bowl of pudding on the stone at the change of shift, and some nights, from the top of the hill, something answers her.