Realistic black and grey tattoo of a snarling wolf above a woman's face with painted markings, on the upper arm.

Wolf and woman portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf's head sits above a woman's face, which has dark painted markings across the eyes, with feathers and wisps of smoke-like shading below. The linework is soft and the shading is detailed, with fine gradients across fur, skin and the feathers. The tattoo is entirely black and grey and fills most of the upper arm, with a few leaves and a small floral element at the edge.

Realism Upper arm Wolf Woman Face paint Feather Leaves Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had been sold off in pieces since March, first the brass, then the striped canvas to a farmer in Boston who wanted it for a barn roof. Nell Marrow sat on an upturned crate behind the wagons and worked black greasepaint across her eyelids with her little finger, the way her mother had shown her, two hard bars from temple to cheekbone. Harrow watched her from the end of his chain. He was grey going white at the muzzle now, and the crowds that once screamed at him had stopped coming.

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The manager, Mr Oakes, came round with the takings tin rattling like a dropped bell and said the Thursday in Spalding had brought in four shillings. He told her to pack the feathers, since nobody paid for feathers any more. Nell didn't answer. She took the eagle-plume headdress from the trunk, the one with the split quill, and set it across her knees. It still smelled of the cedar oil her mother used.

That night Harrow slipped his collar. She found the chain lying open in the wet grass and the wagon door swinging, and she followed the prints across the stubble towards the drove road, a lantern in one hand and the headdress under her arm. Smoke from the burning stubble drifted low over the fields and softened everything, as though the world had been shaded in with a pencil and a thumb.

At the edge of the fen she found him sitting on his haunches, facing the moon, not howling, only waiting. She stopped beside him and laid a single feather in the mud between them. He looked at it, then at her, then got up and walked back the way they had come, slow enough that she could keep pace. Behind them the smoke went on climbing, and the empty wagons stood dark against it. She left the feather where it lay.