Forearm tattoo of a grey wolf with red splatter accents, with block lettering above reading Be strong when you are weak, brave when you are scared and humble when you are victorious.

Wolf and motto on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A greyscale wolf's head fills the lower forearm, with shaded fur, pale eyes and a dark nose rendered in soft, layered shading. Above it, bold block lettering in grey and white sets out a three-part motto, with splashes of red ink behind the words and around the wolf's eyes. The composition is centred on the forearm and the rest of the body is out of frame.

Lettering Realism Forearm Wolf Lettering Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin climbed the gatehouse stair at dusk because the wolf had returned to the ruin again, lying in the nettles below the portcullis as if the place still answered to it. Above the arch, a lord who had died before her grandmother was born had cut a motto into the stone, and the rain had worn it nearly smooth. Someone had since rubbed red ochre into the letters, so the words stood out against the grey like a warning the weather had not managed to take back.

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She read them aloud the way her father used to, one clause at a time, tapping each line with a cold finger. Be strong when you are weak. Brave when you are scared. Humble when you are victorious. The wolf lifted its head and watched her with pale, unhurried eyes, and she noticed the foreleg it kept tucked under its chest. A snare wire had bitten deep into the fur, and the wound was going bad at the edges. Down in the village Mr Hollis had already sworn to shoot anything taking his ewes, and he would not ask whether the wolf had been hungry first.

She went down with the heel of yesterday's loaf and a knife wrapped in cloth, and sat on the wet step while the wolf watched without moving. It let her take the leg across her lap. It let her wash the cut with rainwater from the cistern and bind it with a strip torn from her petticoat. When she stood, it did not follow her, but when she looked back from the arch it had shifted into the last of the light, closer to the wall.

By morning the rain had come in sideways and the ochre had run down the stones in long red tongues, pooling in the cracks beneath the words. The nettles were trampled flat in a patch the shape of a sleeping animal. Tamsin walked the ridge twice looking for grey fur and found none, only the motto above the gate, still legible, still telling nobody the same three things.