Black and grey wolf head tattoo with three roses on each side and a geometric line design above, placed on the chest below the breasts.

Wolf head and roses on the chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded wolf head sits at the centre of the design, facing forward with light-coloured eyes and a dark nose. Two clusters of realistic roses frame it on either side, with leaves and fine outlines, and a thin geometric line motif rises above the wolf. The work is in black and grey with soft shading and is photographed straight on against plain skin.

Realism Geometric Botanical Chest Wolf Rose Geometric Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tom Ashby's barge, the Lark, was tied up at the lock below Hendon's Cut the night the river came over the towpath. His daughter Nell was the one who saw the wolf on the far bank, sitting in the reeds with its ears up, watching the lamp on the bow as if it had been waiting for someone foolish enough to carry it.

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The lock-keeper said wolves had not walked that county in three hundred years, and that a wolf seen in flood had come to collect a debt. Nell did not believe him. She took a heel of bread and a dish of the grease they rendered for the windlass, and went along the bank in her boots while her father slept in the cabin.

The wolf did not run. It let her come close enough to see that its eyes were pale, nearly silver in the lamplight, and that the fur along its neck was grey as ash on a cold hearth. Roses had grown up through the reeds around it, black-stemmed and heavy with rain, though it was March and there were no roses in that county. Nell set the dish down. The wolf ate, then turned and walked into the water without a splash, and where it went the river lay flat as glass for the length of a barge.

She came home soaked to the knee. Her father asked where she had been, and she told him the truth. He laughed and put the kettle on, and when they cast off in the morning the lock gates swung open by themselves. The wolf has ridden the Lark's bow every spring since, though only Nell can see it, and the river has never once turned against us.