Black ink drawing of a snarling wolf behind a long-haired figure, with smoke wisps curling through the composition in dense hatched linework.

Wolf and long-haired figure in smoke

Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head and shoulder sit behind a figure with long, flowing hair who rests a hand near the face. Wisps of smoke or cloud curl around both figures and across the wolf's fur, which is rendered in dense, directional hatching. The drawing is entirely black ink on white, with no colour and a plain background.

Wolf Figure Long hair Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down off the moor the winter the herring failed, and it did not go for the sheep. It sat on the harbour wall at dusk with its breath going up grey in the cold, and the fishermen of Skerrow threw stones until their arms gave out. Only old Ilse Harrow walked out to it with a clay pipe and a twist of tobacco, and sat down beside it as if it were a neighbour waiting for the tide.

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What the wolf wanted, she never said in the tellings. She talked to it about the price of salt and the boy who had drowned off the Mackerel Stones, and when she ran out of talk she blew smoke at the sky and the wolf breathed back, and the two plumes knotted together above the wall. Each night the smoke came thicker. Each morning the boats found the water a little fuller of fish, though nobody could say how.

By Candlemas the men had stopped throwing stones. They went out in the grey boats and came back heavy, and they saw that the wolf's fur had taken on the pattern of the sea at dawn, dense and running the one way, like a tide. Ilse grew thinner. Her pipe went out and she did not light it again.

On the last night of the frost they found her on the wall with her hands folded in her lap, and nothing beside her but a long grey hair caught on the stone and a curl of smoke that would not leave the air. The wolf had gone back to the moor. Some say it is still up there, keeping the weather off the harbour. The fishermen never threw another stone.