Black line drawing of a wolf's face seen from the front, with sketched fur strokes and no shading, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf face line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing wolf head is drawn in black linework on a white background. The eyes, nose and muzzle are defined with loose, sketchy strokes, and the fur is suggested by fine hatching around the ears and cheeks. The drawing is in one colour with no shading or fill, and the head fills most of the frame with the neck and chest fading out below.

Wolf Animal Face Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mule stops at the cairn above Hollin Gap because the wind has taken the path, and you stand with the lantern held low, trying to remember whether the old shepherd told you to keep the wall on your left or your right. Snow comes sideways off the ridge, thin and hard as sand. Below, the valley is a grey sheet with no lights in it, and the flour for Brackfell market is waiting at the bottom of it, and the price of flour will not wait.

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Something moves on the scree above the cairn. You do not lift the lantern. Eyes catch the light first, two pale coins set deep under a brow of rock, and then the rest of it arrives: a long grey head, ears laid back and then forward, the fur on its cheeks blown into fine ragged strokes as if someone had drawn it in a hurry with a sharp pen. It does not come down. It watches you the way the shepherd watched the weather, patiently, and then it turns and walks off along the wall, stops, and looks back.

You know better than to follow an animal. You follow anyway, because the mule plants its hooves and will not go on. The wolf stays always ten paces ahead, pausing at each rise. At the shoulder of the pass, where the snow lies smooth as a bedsheet, it stops beside a place where the cornice hangs out over nothing, and sits. You step round the far side, and the ground gives a low, soft sigh under your boot, and you understand that the smooth white was a lie.

When you reach the bottom of the pass at dawn, the mule is steaming and your fingers have stopped hurting. Above you, a single line of prints runs down through the snow, each one set exactly where you set your own feet. You never saw the wolf go. Below the last rise the prints keep on down the valley toward the market, and you walk in them all the way to the town.