Black and grey Japanese-style tattoo of a wolf with swirling clouds on the upper arm and shoulder, shown from two angles.

Wolf and swirling clouds on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf with smoke or wind curling from its muzzle sits on the upper arm, with large swirling clouds or waves rising over the shoulder. The linework is fine and the fur and clouds are built up with dense stippling and grey shading. The image shows two side-by-side views of the same arm against a dark background, with a black vest visible at the top.

Japanese Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Wolf Cloud Smoke Swirl Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down through the Bramley rows the week the windfalls started. You were up the ladder with a basket on your hip, and you did not hear it until the rungs stopped humming under your feet. Below, between the plum trees, something grey sat on its haunches and watched you with eyes the colour of cold tea.

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Its breath came out in slow curls, and where they touched the low leaves they lifted and folded over themselves like water remembering it was a wave. Old Harriet, who owned the orchard before the council and then nobody, used to say the wolves had left the valley in her grandfather's day, and that anything which returned wanted an account settled. Each September she left a bowl of milk by the gate. Each morning it was empty.

You climbed down and set a windfall on the grass. The wolf did not touch it. It rose, stepped over the fruit as neatly as a cat crossing a wet floor, and walked to the rusted gate. There it looked back, and the cloud from its muzzle drifted into the hawthorn and hung there until the whole hedge was white.

By first light the mist lay over the rows like a dropped sheet. The apples were still on the boughs, bright with dew, and the bowl by the gate was full to its rim with rain. In the dust beside it, a single pad print the size of your palm pointed uphill, and the clouds kept sliding down the slope as if they were looking for something they had mislaid.