Black and grey tattoo of a woman wearing a wolf's head like a hood, with a shaded rose and swirls, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf-headed woman and rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face with long flowing hair sits beneath a wolf's head, which forms a headdress across the top of the design. A shaded rose with leaves and scroll swirls fills the lower part of the piece, which runs down the forearm. The work uses soft grey shading and dark outlines, with no colour ink.

Neo-trad Forearm Woman Wolf Rose Leaves Swirl Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Ashby kept the tiller under her arm and her eyes on the water, because her father had taught her that a thing following a boat wants you to look back. The towpath was quiet past Hawford lock. The lock keeper's dog had stopped barking an hour before, and the willows along the cut hung so still they might have been painted onto the dusk.

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The wolf was waiting at the mooring rings when they tied up. It was grey as wet slate, with a pale streak down its muzzle and a small silver cross caught in the fur between its brows, and it did not growl. It simply sat, the way a dog sits at a door it expects to be opened. Nell had seen that same face twice before, once on the lid of her mother's tea tin and once in the margin of a letter from a man who never came back up the river.

She took the lantern with the painted roses from its hook and followed. The wolf kept to the edge of the light, stopping where the path forked toward the old mill, and waited with its head turned to the black water. Under the broken sluice gate a narrowboat lay on its side, its roses flaking, and from inside its cabin came a child's voice singing the tune Nell's mother used to hum over the stove.

Nell knelt in the cold mud and reached in. The wolf lay down beside her, heavy and warm, and the lantern light ran over the flowers on the cabin wall. She had come for the boat. She stayed for the song, and for the wolf, which closed its eyes as if its work were finished.