Black tribal design of a howling wolf head forming one side of a heart, with a swirled moon filling the other side, shown as a flat drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal wolf head in a heart with moon

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A flat black and white drawing of a wolf head in profile, mouth open as if howling, with its ear and mane outlined in bold tribal linework. The wolf forms the left half of a heart shape, and the right half holds a large circle decorated with solid black spiral and swirl shapes. The design uses solid black areas and white negative space on a plain white background.

Blackwork Wolf Heart Moon Spiral Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Aldous had counted the wolves for three winters, and this year there were only two left on the fell. He knew their howls the way he knew the bells: the grey bitch always began, a thin rising thread, and the dog came in under her a moment later, deeper, as if he had been waiting at the gate for permission. The abbot called it a sin to listen. Aldous listened anyway, from the cold step of the lavabo, with his hands tucked into his sleeves.

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The moon that year was swollen and nearly full, and it hung over the ridge like a wheel someone had forgotten to oil. Its face was pocked with dark patches that the novices said were the shadows of saints. Aldous thought they looked more like the marks a hot iron leaves on linen, or the places where a spiral had been scratched away and started again. Every night the wolves answered it, and every night the moon seemed to hang a little lower to hear them.

On the feast of Saint Cuthbert the grey bitch did not come down from the fell. Aldous went up alone at dusk with a lantern and a heel of bread. He found her in the bracken with her muzzle lifted, singing to nothing, her ruff stiff with frost. When he set the bread down she did not flinch. She only turned her head, opened her jaws, and let the last note go out over the valley until the abbey bell began for compline and drowned it.

Aldous went back down in the dark and did not tell the abbot. In the morning he cut a fresh spiral in the wax of his tablet, then another, and then he stopped, because the shape had found its own way back round to a heart.