Black and grey wolf head tattoo with a dark splash background on the upper arm, with a faint red wash at the top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf head on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A snarling wolf head in profile, with an open mouth and bared teeth, fills most of the frame. The scales and fur are rendered with heavy dark outlines and grey shading, with some blue tones on the textured areas. The head sits on a dark, splashed background with a faint red wash at the upper edge, and the person's white sleeve is visible at the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had counted the sheep twice before she saw the tracks, great pads pressed into the rime beside the wall, and she knew then that the wolf had come down from the scree again. Her father had told her the old stories at the fire: how the grey beast was the last of the hill-kin, how it kept the high pass and would not step below the tree line unless the valley had broken faith with it.

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She did not believe the stories, not properly, not until the dog came back from the bridge with its hackles up and its tail clamped flat. The water under the bridge had frozen to black glass, and something stood on the far bank, shouldering the dark. Its ruff was ridged like slate shingles, each edge catching the last grey light, and when it opened its jaws the breath went out of it in a long pale plume.

Nell had no gun. She had a lantern, a coil of rope, and the knowledge that the lambing pens were a quarter mile upwind. So she walked out onto the ice, slowly, singing the tuneless hymn her mother used to hum over the wash tub, and she held the lantern high.

The wolf watched her come. At the middle of the ford it lowered its great head and let out a sound that was less a snarl than a question. Nell set the lantern down on the ice between them and stepped back. In the morning the lamp was still burning, and beside it lay one ewe's bell, tied with a strip of blue wool, and no sign of anything else at all.

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