Two hands with traditional tattoos: a red-eyed wolf head on the back of one hand, a woman in a beanie on the other, and black lettering across the fingers.

Wolf and portrait hand tattoos with lettering

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are shown palm side in, with a snarling grey wolf head with red eyes on the back of the left hand and a woman in a dark beanie on the right hand. Both images use bold black outlines with solid colour fills in red, grey, cream and skin tones. Black block lettering reading STAY TRUE and LOVESICK runs across the fingers, and a red rose and a partly visible banner sit on the forearms above.

Traditional Lettering Hand Forearm Wolf Rose Lettering Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came to Tobias Crane in the winter of the great flood, bought off a Dutch showman for two ewes and a promise he never meant to keep. That autumn he walked it on a brass chain behind the caravans, and children paid a penny to watch its red eyes catch the lamplight. Nobody asked where a beast that size had been raised, and Tobias preferred it that way.

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The fortune booth at the end of the row belonged to Marta Vell, who read palms by touch and never once looked at the lines. She wore a grey knitted cap pulled low over her ears and kept a tin of gold tacks beside the till. On the first night she told Tobias the wolf would not see out the season. He laughed, and she only turned his hand over and traced the scar across his knuckles as though it were a map.

On the last night of the fair the chain lay in the grass, its links neatly opened. Tobias found the wolf sitting outside Marta's booth, not running, its breath steaming in the cold. Written in soot across her fingers were the words STAY TRUE, and the wolf turned its head toward him as if to ask whether he knew what they meant.

He did not. He stood a long while in the mud as the caravans rolled out one by one, then picked up the brass chain, coiled it, and left it on her step. When he looked back the booth was dark and the wolf was gone, and the grass where it had sat was already white with frost.