Three black ink flash drawings on grey paper: a wolf head framed by peonies and leaves, a mandala-patterned wolf head in dotwork, and a partly visible third design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf heads with flowers and mandala designs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Three pen drawings of tattoo designs sit on grey paper against a dark background. The left sheet shows a shaded wolf head surrounded by peonies, buds and leafy stems, drawn with fine hatched linework. The upper right sheet shows a wolf head filled with ornamental mandala patterns and stippled dots, and the lower right sheet is cropped so only part of a drawn design is visible.

Botanical Dotwork Wolf Peony Flower Leaves Mandala Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The peonies were planted by a countess who never saw them bloom, because the north wall came down the winter before the first bud. Mrs Harrow, who kept the keys to Ardmoor before me, said the wolf came with the grounds, the way the damp and the crows did. I didn't believe her until the April I started the estate ledger and found a grey head already sketched at the broken gate, drawn in a hand that wasn't mine.

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I began drawing it myself to keep my hands busy through the long evenings. Each dusk the wolf sat on the fallen capital by the gate, watching the lane, and each night I drew it a little more finely, hatching the ruff until my pen ran dry, then working dots and petals around its brow the way the old masons carved roundels into the chapel stone. Every sheet got a flower too: a peony, then a bud, then a spray of leaves that crept off the edge of the page.

In May a man from the council arrived with a surveyor's chain and plans that would turn the rose beds into car spaces and fill the moat with gravel. He asked about the wolf the villagers talked of. I told him there was nothing in the grounds but me and the crows. When I turned round he had gone very still, and the wolf had come down off the capital and sat square across the lane with its eyes on his folder. He left the chain in the grass and never came back for it.

The peonies opened all at once the following week, pale and heavy and dripping with rain. I found one petal pressed between the last pages of the ledger, soft as the inside of a wrist, and beside it a drawing I had no memory of making: the wolf wearing a crown of its own flowers, looking straight out at me as if it had been waiting for me to finish.