Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a woman with a wolf's head over her head, braided hair tied with red ribbons and leaves, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf-headed woman portrait with braids and leaves

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A woman's face sits beneath a brown wolf's head with yellow eyes and bared teeth, and her long braided hair ends in red ribbons. Green leaves and small red berries frame the figure on both sides. The bold black outlines and smooth shading on the face are set against vivid colour, and the design fills the frame with a mirrored view of the same piece at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is only good for the one side of you. You'll want this one with the wind in it, so I'll tell it the way my mother told it to me on this very rock, with the sheep bells going outside. Mhairi Ruadh had three brothers and a boat called the Sheila, and the Sheila went out one March morning and did not come home.

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The women of Skerrow gathered at the top of the machair where the bog runs down to the sea. Nobody lit a lamp that night. Mhairi plaited her hair the way her grandmother taught her, in two long ropes, and knotted each end with red wool dyed in rowan bark, so the thing in the peat would know which girl was asking. Then she said the words her grandmother had said, which I'll not repeat to you, for they are not for the fireside.

The wolf came up out of the bog with its eyes lit like two lamps, and it was no beast at all but the old keeper of the sound, tired of the sea taking its tithe. It looked at her a long while. Then it said, in her grandmother's voice, that a face can be lent but never given, and it lowered its great head over her own. Its teeth rested at her hairline, and she did not flinch, and the leaves came up round her shoulders like a hedge in May.

The Sheila came in on the next tide with her sail torn and three brothers asleep in the bilge, and nobody on Skerrow ever looked at Mhairi quite the same way again. The wolf kept the other half of her. Her ribbons still hang on the gorse at the foot of the bog, red as rowan, and if you walk that path in March you will hear her braids knocking against the stones. Now, put another peat on that fire, and mind the lamp, for the sea is listening.

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