Black and grey realism tattoo of a wolf head over a woman's face with red face markings, covering the upper arm.

Wolf and woman portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A wolf's head sits above a woman's face, with flowing hair that trails down the arm and a claw necklace at her throat. The shading is smooth and realistic, with fine fur detail on the wolf and soft greys across the skin, while small areas of red on her face and lips add the only colour. The design wraps the upper arm, with the figure's hair continuing down towards the elbow.

Realism Upper arm Wolf Woman Face Hair Claw Necklace Face paint Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on Tarn Fell for nine days when Ysolde came down the track with red stripes on her cheeks and her hair hanging to her knees. The shepherds at Hollin Gate saw her coming and reached for their crooks, because nobody had seen her since spring, when the grey bitch that had whelped beside her hearth went up the fell and did not return. Ysolde said nothing to them. She walked past the sheepfold to the flat stone where her mother had buried a cracked bell, and knelt there in the wet.

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Her father had laid the traps on that fell for thirty years. He told her a wolf was a debt the valley paid in lambs, and the debt could be collected this season or the next. She grew up believing him. What she had not believed was that the pack would bring back what he had lost: first a boy's coat smelling of peat smoke, then the boy himself, walking out of the bracken with pale eyes and the same red paint drawn down his jaw.

The shepherds followed her up at dusk. They found the fell empty except for a ring of trodden heather and a necklace of curved claws hung from a fencepost, each one polished, each one older than the valley. Nobody took it down. In the morning the traps lay sprung and empty, and the new lambs were counted twice without one missing.

Ysolde still walks the high path after dark. When the ewes are lambing, a grey shape waits at the edge of the lantern light, and she lifts a hand to it the way one greets a neighbour across a wall. Then she goes home and sleeps with the door unbarred. Her father's rifle still hangs above the hearth, and nobody in Hollin Gate has thought to ask her to take it down.