Rust-coloured tribal design of a leaping wolf with knotwork patterns across its body and a curled tail, shown on a pale textured background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal knotwork wolf leaping design

Colour · Flash

A leaping wolf with a long, curling tail is drawn in bold tribal outline with interlaced knotwork filling its body and legs. The linework is solid and uses open and filled areas to suggest fur and structure, all in a single rust-brown ink on a pale, grainy background.

Wolf Knotwork Tribal Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, where the wasps can't get at your cup. Late August, and the Bramley windfalls are going to vinegar in the long grass, so mind your feet. My grandmother's grandmother told this one under the same old apple tree down by the wall at Hollin Cross, and she swore the wolf was still in the hedge.

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There was a wolf that lived in the knotted roots of that orchard, grey as ash, with a tail that curled up like bracken in the frost. The farmer's daughter, Nell Ashby, left a pocketful of hazelnuts at the stile for it each evening. Every harvest she counted the trees, and every harvest the count came out one short, and she never could say which tree had gone.

Then the year the rain came sideways in September, the wolf came over the wall in a single leap, the way a thing does when it has been waiting a long time. It did not take the lambs. It took the bell rope off the chapel door and wound it round its own ribs, and it went up the slope into the mist with all four feet off the ground at once. Nell saw its shadow stretch between two oaks and then there was only the rope lying in the wet.

Nobody ever found the tree. But come the first frost, the Bramley by the wall bore fruit that tasted of smoke and iron, and if you cut one across the middle you will find the seeds laid out in a pattern, lacing over and under, like stitches holding something in that would rather be running.