Black tribal flash design of a wolf head at the base with flame-like swirls rising above it, shown on a plain white background.

Tribal wolf head with flame design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black tribal design with a wolf or fox-like head at the bottom and flame-like shapes rising above it. The linework is made of solid, sharp-tipped black shapes with no shading or grey tones. The design is shown in isolation on a white background, with the flames forming a tall, narrow composition.

Blackwork Tribal Wolf Flame Fox

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, all of you, the kettle isn't boiling and a story told standing up goes straight through a man like cold tea. Pass me that ladle. You've heard the tale of the Carrow Nab cook who fed the wolf, and you've heard it wrong, the way landsmen always get things wrong. This is the true one, the one my grandmother told in a galley smaller than this, with a stove that smoked like a bad pipe.

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The wolf came down off the hill the winter the herring failed. It was grey at the muzzle and thin at the ribs, and along its back ran fire, licking up from the shoulders toward the ears in long black tongues that never once singed its fur. Some said it was a fox that had swallowed a lamp. Some said worse. The innkeeper at Carrow Nab, a widow named Sigrun Dalby, did not care what it was. She left the back door open each night with a bowl of salt fish heads and a ladle of cold porridge set on the step.

Every morning the bowl was licked clean, and the flagstones by the door were warm as new bread. Then one night the wolf did not come, and the fire went out of the air and climbed instead up the inn's chimney, a single bright column that stood above the roofs like a finger pointing at the water. The men lost in the fog that week saw it from the sea and turned their boats toward it, one after another, until every hull was home and no wife was left counting boats on the quay.

So when you see flame going up where no fire should be, you don't bank it and you don't curse it. You leave the door unlatched and you put something out for the hungry. Now, who has been at my ladle?