Traditional style wolf head tattoo with bold black outlines, pierced by two arrows and showing a red tongue and blood drips, photographed on the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf head with arrows

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A snarling wolf head with its jaws open and a red tongue hangs out, with two arrows passing through the head and red drips falling from them. The linework is bold and black, with solid black fill for the fur and flat red and orange for the tongue and blood. The collage shows the tattoo from three angles, two wider shots of the limb and one close-up of the design.

Traditional Other Wolf Arrow Blood Tongue

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down from the Marrowfell the week the bridge at Sallow Ford washed out, and by the third night it had taken two goats and a shepherd's dog from the byre behind the chapel. You are the one the captain sends up with the longbow, because you are the only archer left in Veyl who can string it without swearing. Captain Orrin hands you a quiver of nine arrows and tells you not to waste a single one.

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The track climbs through bracken gone the colour of rust. You find the prints at dusk, each one as wide as a child's hand, and follow them into a stand of blackthorn where the air smells of wet fur and iron. The wolf is waiting on a shelf of slate above you. It does not run. It opens its jaws slowly and lets its red tongue loll over its teeth, as though it has been expecting you since the bridge fell, and as though it finds you a little funny.

You draw. The first arrow goes through the ruff of its neck and the wolf does not flinch. The second takes it through the jaw, and the shaft sticks there like a bit in a horse's mouth. Dark drops patter onto the leaves below. You wait for it to die, or to scream. Instead it looks down at you with something close to pity, shakes its great head once, and the arrows fall out of it like kindling from a broken bundle.

You walk down the mountain with nine arrows and no wolf, and the captain does not believe a word. Only when you show him the fletching, still wet and stained red, does he go pale and ask what you promised it. You tell him you promised nothing. You only drew a bow on a thing that had already decided to let you go, and that is the part you cannot forgive yourself for.