Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf silhouette filled with forest and mountains

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A standing wolf is shown in side profile, with its head turned to the right. The body is a solid black silhouette except for an upper section filled with stippled dots forming mountains, pine trees and a glowing moon, with a small leaping hare silhouetted near the middle. The drawing is in pure black ink on a white background, with fine dotwork shading creating texture and depth.

Dotwork Blackwork Wolf Forest Mountain Moon Pine tree Hare Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fishermen of Skerrig Quay had stopped counting the grey wolf's visits by the time the herring ran thin that winter. It came down from the high pines each night when the tide was out, walked the shingle with its head turned towards the lighthouse, and was gone back up the hill before the bells rang for the first boats.

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Old Mairi kept the net loft at the end of the pier, and she was the only one who would leave out a split of salt cod for it. She said the wolf was carrying the hills on its back, and that if you looked close on a clear night you could see the snow on the peaks inside its flank, and the moon sitting up in its shoulder like a lamp someone had forgotten to put out. Her nephew Tam laughed at her and said it was only a wolf with a full belly and a long memory.

One night in February a hare came out along the sea wall, running from something the boats could not see. It leapt the gap between two stones and landed in the wolf's own shadow, and the wolf did not chase it. It lowered its head the way a dog does when a child drops a ball, and waited until the hare was safe up the cliff path. Mairi said that was the bargain. The forest keeps what it needs, and the sea keeps what it is given.

Tam went out with the last boat in March and did not come back for three days. When he walked up the quay with salt in his beard, he had a grey hare's scut caught in his coat and no memory of the storm. Mairi put the cod on the step that night and said nothing, but the wolf was there by morning, and so was the moon, pale as a coin, riding in its shoulder.