Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf head with poppies

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A wolf head faces left in profile, its fur built up from dense pen hatching and fine linework. Open poppy blooms and leaves cluster around the neck and muzzle, with looser scribbled shading along the lower edge. The drawing uses black ink only on pale paper.

Botanical Wolf Poppy Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came down the lane the week after the last of the ewes lambed, when the snow had crusted hard enough to bear a man's weight but not a dog's. My father saw it first from the milking parlour and said nothing. He just set the bucket down and reached for the rifle, and I remember thinking how carefully he put the bucket down, as though it mattered where it landed.

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It did not run. It stood at the top of the orchard wall with its head turned side-on, the way the wolves in Gran's old picture book were drawn, and its coat was so thick with grey that the snow seemed to be growing out of it. Behind it, on the drifts where the poppy field had been in June, the dead stalks poked up black through the white like pen strokes someone had gone over too many times.

Gran had planted those poppies the spring she came to the farm as a bride. She said they were for the men who had not come home from the last war, though she never said which men or how she knew. Every June the field went red, and every autumn she scattered the seed heads along the hedges. She died in February. We did not speak much about her after that, and the field was never sown again.

Dad lowered the rifle. He walked out through the gate, slow, hands open, and the wolf watched him come the whole way without moving. When he reached the wall it dipped its head, once, and turned, and the snow took its tracks almost before they were finished. In the morning there was a single poppy head pushed up through the frost beside the gate, papery and red, and Dad picked it and put it in his top pocket without a word.