Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a wolf's head emerging from a torn shape, with pale hands gripping it, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf head held by hands on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf's head with pointed ears sits within a jagged, torn-paper shape, with two pale hands gripping and cradling it from both sides. The head is built from dense stippled dots and fine shading, giving soft tonal depth against the lighter skin. The image is tightly framed on a limb against a dark background, with the design centred and filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Wolf Wolf head Hand Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf has been in the lambing shed since before light, and by the time the frost lifts off the yard you have stopped pretending it is a dog. Your father stands on the stepladder with the rope coiled over his shoulder, swearing at the cold, and it is you who has to go in.

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Inside, the straw is grey with rime and the animal does not move when you crouch. Its eyes are half open and its breath is a thin thread in the air. Your grandmother used to say that a wolf which comes down to a farm in winter has been hungry a long time, and hungry things can be talked down the way you talk down a ewe that won't stand. So you kneel, hold your palms out flat, and keep your voice at the pitch she used.

It takes the length of a milking to get close enough. When your hands finally close around its head, one on each side, the way you would cup a lamb's skull to check for fever, you feel the fur bristle and then settle. The ears press flat against your fingers. Nothing bites. Your father stops in the doorway with the rope slack in his fist and does not come any nearer.

When the thaw comes and the hill goes green again, he will ask what you did, and you will only say you held on. The wolf is long gone over the wall, its prints running off into the beck. On the inside of the shed door, where the sun never reaches, there is a smear of frost in the shape of two open hands, and it stays there until spring.