Upper arm and shoulder tattoo of a winged wolf head inside a diamond frame of runes, with knotwork above, in blackwork and dotwork style.

Wolf in runic frame on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A winged wolf head sits centrally inside a large diamond frame filled with carved-style runes, with interlaced knotwork continuing across the shoulder above. The linework is heavy black, with stippled dotwork shading on the feathers and fur and smooth black fills in the frame. Dark reddish-brown fills sit behind the frame panels, giving the piece a muted two-tone effect.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Wolf Wing Rune Knotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hild had carved the wolf's head three times before the ring-lord looked at it and said it was still asleep. So she left the head alone and worked the frame instead, the long diamond of staves that ran round the board like a fence of letters. Each rune had to be cut square and deep enough to hold the ochre, and she counted them under her breath while the grit from the whetstone settled on her wrists.

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The wings were the hard part. Her master had told her that a wolf with wings was a thing a man only dreamed of on bad nights, and that a carver who gave it feathers had better know which way the wind blew. She dotted the fur with a bone punch until her shoulder burned, and the little pits caught the lamplight the way wet bark does.

On the last evening, when the boards were stacked against the byre wall, she noticed the runes ran differently on the left side of the frame. Read backwards, they spelled a name: Sigurd Haldsson, the boy the sea had taken off Skarvik the spring before. She understood then that the ring-lord had not ordered a shield at all. He had ordered a headstone that could travel by sea.

She did not tell him she knew. At dawn she brushed the last of the red earth over the frame, let it dry in the thin sun, and nailed the board to the prow of the ship, where the wolf could watch the water with its wing lifted as if it meant to go out and fetch him home.