Neo-traditional wolf head tattoo on an upper arm, framed by bird skulls, rope, yellow leaves with red berries and a crescent moon.

Wolf and bird skulls on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A wolf's head in grey shading looks left, with a yellow eye and a black nose, set among two bird skulls, a coiled rope and foliage. Bold black outlines, smooth grey shading and yellow and red accents on the leaves and berries give it a classic bold look. The design fills the arm, with a pale crescent moon behind the wolf on the left.

Neo-trad Upper arm Wolf Rope Leaves Berry Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the wolf came down off the hill on Tuesday, the week the moon went thin, and Mr Harrow swore it looked at him the way the bank manager does. Nobody in Cairnfield had seen a wolf since before the war, so the whole village went up the track with lanterns to see the body. I was the only one who thought to bring the twine.

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We carried it to the back of the taxidermy shed and I dressed the pelt by the light of the paraffin lamp, just as your father taught me before he took the boat south. The skull I boiled clean in the copper. Two rooks had come off the Gallows Wood that same week, flat and grey as slate, and I have wired them either side of the wolf's head so it seems to be looking out between them. You would laugh. The rope is the old tarred line your father never got round to throwing out, and I have looped it through the eyeholes so it falls in a loose curl down the wall.

Mrs Gilchrist asked me yesterday what the leaves were for. I said they were for autumn, which is the only season I know that comes with berries and blood both. She did not understand, and I did not explain. I painted the berries red myself, and the leaves a sort of mustard yellow, because the nearest thing I had to gold was the colour of the lamp.

Last night I hung a paper moon on the nail above the door, the way you used to do for me when the dark came early. I left the lamp burning in the window. If the post is slow, I will keep it lit until you come up the track, wolf or no wolf, with the rope over your shoulder and nothing in your hands but the rooks.