Black and grey wolf head tattoo with roses across the abdomen, with script lettering above and coloured tattoos on the thighs and upper arms.

Wolf and roses across the abdomen

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close shot of a torso lying on a wooden floor, cropped below the chin, with a large wolf head at the centre of the abdomen framed by dark rose blooms. Above it, looping script lettering sits within scrollwork, and a red gem hangs from the wolf's collar. The shading is dark and smooth, and the thigh tattoos at the bottom of the frame use green and blue ink.

Neo-trad Lettering Other Thigh Upper arm Wolf Rose Script Scrollwork Gem Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told twice to leave the wolf outside the cloister wall, and twice he found it lying beside the rose bed in the morning, its grey muzzle on its paws, as though it had been waiting for the bell. The abbess had stopped scolding him. She only asked whether the beast had eaten, and when he said no, she sighed and sent him to the kitchen for scraps.

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The wolf had come up from the valley in the hard week after Candlemas, when the snow lay so deep the mill race froze solid. It was thin then. Its collar was a strip of old harness, and fastened to it, on a cord of plaited wool, hung a red stone the size of a quail's egg that caught the light from the chapel windows. Nobody in the house could say where it had come from. Anselm thought it a relic. The abbess thought it was none of their business.

By Lent the roses had come back along the south wall, and the wolf lay in them through the afternoons, eyes half shut, the petals dark with the last of the evening sun. Anselm carved the words the abbess dictated onto the gatehouse lintel, looping the letters through a border of leaves. When he asked what they meant, she told him to read them aloud at vespers and stop asking questions.

In the spring the gate was found standing open. The wolf was gone. Beside the threshold lay the red stone on its cord, polished smooth, and Anselm kept it in his sleeve for the rest of his life, though he never once wore it.