Solid black blackwork tattoo of a paw print with a wolf head in silhouette inside the main pad, on the lower leg.

Wolf head within a paw print on a lower leg

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black paw print fills most of the frame, with four toe pads and a smaller pad above, each with crisp, even edges. Inside the large central pad, a wolf head in profile is cut out in negative space, with white lines defining the snout, ear and jaw. The ink is entirely black on pale skin, with the design centred and shown straight on.

Blackwork Calf Paw print Wolf Animal Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow had learned to read a track before she learned to read the weather, and on the morning the Thornber ewes went missing she crouched in the frost by the beck and counted the toes twice. Four broad pads in a curve, two smaller ones set above like a pair of raised eyebrows, the edges so clean that the mud had kept every line. Mr Gale at the feed merchant's had sworn there were no wolves left in the dales since the old queen's time. Ada had never trusted a man who swore to anything before breakfast.

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She followed the prints up the scree path past the lime works, where the ground softened and the marks came close enough together that she could see the weight shift at each step. The beast walked steadily, never hurrying, never stopping. Twice she lost the line in the bracken and twice she found it again on the flat stones, as if the animal wanted her to keep up. By noon her boots were wet through and the wind had found the gap in her collar.

At the mouth of the old kiln she heard the ewes before she saw them, a tight, complaining bleat. They were penned against the back wall in a neat half circle, and not one had been torn. The wolf stood at the entrance with its grey ruff raised and its head turned towards her, as patient as a verger. Ada held out her hand and kept still, and the animal considered her for the length of a held breath, then turned and went up the slope without a sound.

She made a plaster cast of the print before the wind could take it. On the way down she stopped at the post office and set it on the sill beside the parish notices, where anyone with a boot could see what Mr Gale had been told was not there.