Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a wolf head beneath pine trees with the words Winter is coming curved around it, on the upper thigh.

Wolf head and pine trees on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey wolf head sits in front of a cluster of pine tree silhouettes, with the wolf's fur rendered as dense scale-like shading. The words WINTER IS COMING are set in a bold, curved block lettering that follows the lower edge of the wolf. The tattoo is photographed straight on against a brick wall, with the shading and linework clearly visible.

Blackwork Lettering Thigh Wolf Wolf head Pine tree Tree Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ferry clears Skelder Quay at twenty to nine, and by ten you are the only one awake in the harbour town. The wind has swung north, the kind that comes off Kettle Brae smelling of frost. Above the roofs the pines stand in their black ranks, planted by a laird who wanted hulls for his boats, and tonight they creak like a fleet at anchor.

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Ada Finlay had a rule for nights like this. The lamp stays lit until the last net is in. Winter is coming, the old men on the quay liked to say, as if it were news and not a fact of the calendar. So when you reach the end of the breakwater and find a grey shape sitting on the wet stone, you do not run. It is a wolf, or something cut from the same cloth, its ruff heavy with rime, its breath hanging in the lamplight.

It does not growl. It looks past you towards the channel, where a single green light has begun to wander, a skiff with no one at the tiller. Your hand goes to the coil of line on your hip. The wolf rises, slow and deliberate, walks two paces towards the water, then glances back over its shoulder as if to say you are slow, the way Ada used to when you were a boy and the tide was turning.

So you set the lamp on the bollard, where it can throw its light across the channel, and follow the wolf down the steps. The skiff is snagged on the sunken chain off the point, rocking, and you wade out to the waist with the line between your teeth. When you haul it in, the boy at the tiller is shivering and alive, and the wolf is already gone up the shingle, a dark shape against the pines. You never saw it run.