Black and red tribal tattoo of two intertwined wolves with heart and swirl motifs, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two tribal wolves across the upper back

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A bold tattoo of two wolves interlocked, one drawn in solid black and one in red, with their heads and bodies overlapping. The linework is thick and solid with tapering spikes, swirls and small heart-shaped cutouts filling the fur and bodies. The red and black ink sit side by side on the skin, and the design fills the frame across the upper back.

Back Wolf Heart Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The black one came first, the spring the frost killed the damsons, sliding under the gate of the walled garden as if it had paid for the privilege. I was on my knees in the leek bed with a trowel in my fist and I did not move. Wolves on the moor road were a thing the men at the pub talked about, not a thing that came for your leeks.

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It didn't come for the leeks. It lay down under the medlar where the path bends, chin on its paws, and watched me weed. By June the red one had joined it, pale rust along the flanks, and between them they kept the roe deer out of the brassicas better than the netting my late husband ever strung up. I started leaving a dish of scraps by the water butt, then a second dish, because one was clearly not enough for two.

The red one went first, in February, on a morning so still the rooks sounded like the gate hinge. I found it lying with its tail curled round the black one's back, the way they slept. The black one would not leave its side until I fetched a spade and a sack of lime, and then it stood at the wall and howled once across the valley. I heard nothing answer.

The following spring I dug out the bed where they had lain and sowed red runner beans up the south wall, the dark-podded ones beside them. Some mornings there are prints in the frost by the water butt, two sets, close together, overlapping like knotwork on an old cross. The black one still comes. It sits on the medlar path with its head lowered toward the beans, and I give it the scraps, and neither of us says anything at all.