Black tribal-style wolf head design set within a circle, drawn on a light background, with bold swirling linework and shaded areas.

Tribal wolf head in a circle

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A tribal-style wolf head in profile faces left, with its body and tail curving around to form a circle. The design uses bold black linework with sharp, tapering shapes along the fur and a fine stippled shading in the centre and on the face. The drawing is in black ink on a pale, softly lit background and is composed symmetrically around the circular outline.

Blackwork Wolf Tribal Circle Animal Fur Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cold came off the water early that year, and Eilidh Sorley spent the last week of October scraping rime from the lamp-room glass on Skerrow while her father argued with the boat through the wall. Below them the tide ran a long grey loop around the rocks, the way it always did before a blow, and she could not stop watching it curl.

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Her grandmother had told her the old island wolf was not a wolf at all but the sea itself, lying down with its tail in its mouth so the ships would think it sleeping. Eilidh thought this was nonsense until she found the carving on the underside of the lintel, cut so deep and so careful that the fur ran in black spirals, every point sharp as a gull's beak. Someone had kept it dark with soot for a century.

On the last night of the month the fog came in thick and the foghorn failed. Eilidh climbed the stair with a torch and a tin of lamp oil, and when she reached the gallery she saw the lamp had already lit itself, a pale circle bending through the murk. Her father shouted from the jetty. She did not answer. She fed the wick and watched the beam stretch out over the water, and somewhere beyond it the boat turned towards the light.

By morning the fog had lifted and the island was a bare green scatter under a clean sky. Eilidh went down to the lintel with a rag and wiped the soot from the carved fur, and the lines came up pale against the stone, bright as the day they were cut. Her father stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands. He said nothing about the oil. He only traced the outermost curve with one finger, as if counting it.