Black ink dotwork flash design of a wolf head merged with a woman's face, with a crown, skulls, ram horns, flowers and a hot air balloon.

Wolf and woman surreal design with skulls

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen and ink drawing of a wolf's head fused with a woman's face, with her hair flowing into the lower part of the composition. Around the figures are a crown, skulls, ram horns, a snake, roses, a lotus, a hand holding a feather and a small hot air balloon among clouds. The image is built from fine stippled dots and hatched linework in black on a white background.

Dotwork Wolf Woman Face Crown Skull Snake Rose Lotus Hand Feather Hot air balloon Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram got into the turnip field again the week the snow came, and Dad said he would sell him at Penrith market before Candlemas. It was me who went after him. I followed his hoof prints across the frozen beck until they stopped at the drystone wall, and there sat a grey wolf wearing a crown of frost, as calm as a dog that owned the place. The ram stood beside her, chewing, his horns curled like old rope.

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Nan had a story about that wolf. She said the hill queen came down in hard winters to collect what the farms threw away: a lamb's bell, a broken scythe, the skull of a ewe that died in the lambing shed. She kept a tin of such things under her bed, and when I was small she would let me count them out on the eiderdown. Nobody believed her, least of all Dad, who thought a fox had got into the tin. I stood at the wall with my hands numb and told the wolf I was sorry about the turnips. She looked at me with one bright eye and then at the feather tucked in my hat band, the brown one from the buzzard that crashed into the byre roof in November.

I gave it to her. I don't know why. She took it in her teeth as neatly as a bride takes a glove, and for a moment the wall seemed to lift and sway, and a small striped balloon rose from behind the hawthorn and drifted over the tops towards Cross Fell, with the wolf's crown glinting in its basket.

In the morning the ram was back in his pen, hooves clean, and a lotus of frost had grown on the gate post overnight, every petal sharp. Dad looked at it for a long time and said nothing. I left the tin where it was and went out to feed the sheep.