Black and grey tattoo of a snarling wolf head with pine trees above and Winter is Coming lettering curved beneath it, on the upper thigh.

Wolf head and pines with Winter is Coming lettering

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf head with open jaws sits beneath a cluster of solid black pine trees, with the words WINTER IS COMING set in a curved arc below. The wolf's scales and fur are built from stippled dotwork shading, while the pine trees are solid black silhouettes that give strong contrast. The tattoo is in black ink and greys only, centred and framed within a loose circular composition on the outer thigh.

Dotwork Blackwork Thigh Wolf Pine tree Lettering Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last diner on Route 95 had shut its doors years back, so Dad and I sat in the truck with the engine ticking and the heater blowing grit into our faces. Grandad's motto was painted above the visor of every vehicle he ever owned: a grey wolf's head snarling out from a ring of black pines, and beneath it the words he never tired of repeating. He used to say the desert had never taught him a thing about winter, and that a man from the high valleys above Gorrow kept his coat folded in the boot no matter how hot the sun got. I was seventeen and thought it was just the old fellow's joke.

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Then the cold came down off the ridges in a single night. The forecasters on the radio kept using words like unprecedented, and by morning the creosote bushes were furred white and the water trough had a skin of ice thick enough to crack with a boot heel. Dad said we had to check the far tanks for the ranch, so we drove out along the old road with the wipers frozen and the sand gone hard as concrete under the tyres.

At the cattle grid we found the tracks. They ran straight down the middle of the tarmac, long-legged and unhurried, each print as wide as my palm and sunk clean into the frost. Dad got out and crouched beside them for a long while without saying anything. Then he laughed, a low sound I hadn't heard from him in months, and said, "Well, Grandad was right about one thing."

We drove home with the window down so the cold could come in. In the headlights the painted pines on the visor looked like they had been waiting all along for the road to turn white.