Realism tattoo of a grey wolf with green eyes inside a dreamcatcher with feathers, on the upper arm.

Wolf head with dreamcatcher on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A realistic wolf head faces forward with bright green eyes, set within a hoop that resembles a dreamcatcher. Feathers and beaded cords hang from the lower left of the hoop, with a smaller feather on the right. The shading is soft and detailed in greys and browns, with a pale blue and teal wash behind the wolf.

Realism Upper arm Wolf Dreamcatcher Feather Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The whistle goes at six and you are already at the top of the drift road with your boots unlaced when the dog stops dead at the fence. It is not a dog. Grey as wet slate, it stands on the spoil heap with the dawn behind it, and when your lamp catches its eyes they throw back green, the colour of the bottle glass your mother kept on the windowsill for luck.

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Nobody in Hollin Bank has seen a wolf since the grandfathers' time. Old Tam says the last one was strung up on the chapel gate for taking lambs, and the gate is still there, bent out of true. You say nothing. You go down at seven with the men, coal dust gritty in your teeth, and the cage drops past the seam where the roof sweats silver. You think of the hoop of bent hazel your sister Nell strung with hen feathers and bootlace, the one she hung over her cot to keep the bad dreams in the wood.

At the end of the shift the wolf is waiting at the pit-head, sitting straight, and it does not run. It studies you the way the overman does when he is deciding whether you will last. Beside it, on the cinder, lies a hoop with a long feather hanging from its lower edge and beads strung on a cord, one of them loose. You crouch and pick it up. The feathers are warm from the sun, and when you look up the wolf has gone.

You hang the hoop above your bed that night. Somewhere past midnight the dreams come through it one at a time, black as the coal face, until the last one arrives green and steady, a lamp being carried home up the drift.