Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal wolf design in profile

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised wolf walks to the left in side profile, with its head lowered and its tail sweeping up and back. The body is filled with solid black tribal-style swirls, cut-out shapes and tapering lines that define the muscles and fur. The image is a single flat black design on a light grey background, with no shading or colour.

Wolf Tribal pattern Animal Profile Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the stairwell of Greaves House in the dark, counting landings by the smell of bleach and wet coats. On the seventh floor the lift is always broken, so you take the stairs, and beside the bin chute someone has painted a wolf in black, walking left with its head low as if it is pushing into weather. Nobody on the estate admits to it. Mrs Dunning says it was the boys from the car park. Her grandson says it was a girl who moved away in the spring.

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You stop there most nights with your bag cutting into your shoulder. The swirls along its back look like the patterns on the tins in the corner shop, the kind your nan used to stitch onto cushions, but the lines taper where the legs bend, and the tail rises in a flame that runs right up to the edge of the paint. You trace it once with a finger and the black comes away grey on your skin. Last week a council man came with a roller and left a patch of cream where the head should be.

Your flat is on the twelfth floor, and the letter from the housing office is still under the kettle on the kitchen table, the one that gives you until the end of the month. You have not told your mum. You have told yourself you will go to the viewing on Thursday, and you have said that every Thursday since March.

On Friday the lift works. You ride it up, and when the doors open on the seventh floor the wolf is there, half scrubbed, head gone, tail still climbing. You stand until the doors close and open again. Then you take the stairs one step at a time, head down, tail up, and you do not look back at the wall.