Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf and raven head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a wolf's head in profile facing left, drawn with white-outlined linework and a detailed eye and muzzle. A solid black raven with white feather detail sits over the wolf's neck and shoulder, with its head and wing set against the wolf's fur. The image is entirely black ink and white space, with no shading or grey tones.

Blackwork Wolf Raven Crow Animal Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven had ridden the cratch board since Stourport, and Mabel Crane had stopped asking it to leave. It was the colour of the coal they carried, and it watched the lock gates the way the keeper did, as if it were checking the tolls. The wolf came aboard at Tewkesbury. It walked off the towpath as though it had heard of the boat, and lay down across the hatch with its chin on its paws.

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Nobody claimed the wolf. The keeper at Diglis said a travelling showman had lost a wagon of animals in the flood, and Mabel did not ask more. She fed it the rind of the bacon and the heel of the loaf. The raven watched with its head on one side, and took its own share by lifting the cloth off the bread tin when she was not looking.

At Worcester the river rose in one night and tore the mooring pin from the bank. Mabel was on the tiller in the dark, water hissing over the gunwale, unable to see the weir. The wolf stood in the bow with its ears flat. The raven rose off the cabin roof, circled once, then flew ahead of them, a black shape against the bridge lamps, calling like a rusted hinge.

She steered where the bird went. When they scraped past the piling at the old mill, the wolf looked back at her, pale in the lamplight, and the raven settled on the bollard with one wing spread like a sail. By morning they were tied up at Diglis, the cratch board splintered and the stove still warm. The raven took its share of the bacon. The wolf, for once, did not wait to be fed.