Colourful tattoo of a leaping wolf silhouette filled with pine trees, mountains and a purple and orange night sky, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf silhouette with aurora forest on chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A black wolf silhouette leaps across the upper chest, with its body filled by a row of dark pine trees and its tail by a starry purple night sky. The background shifts from orange near the middle to green along the wolf's head and neck, suggesting an aurora. The shading is smooth and soft-edged, and the bold black outline sits clearly against the pale skin.

Chest Wolf Pine tree Forest Night sky Star Mountain Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, the lot of you, because the fire is low and this is the part where the old men lean in. You want to know about the Morrow Brothers' Travelling Marvel, that went under the summer the bridge at Tallow Ford fell into the river. I was the boy who fed the animals. Nobody else would take the wolf.

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Her name was Sable, though the handbill called her the Iron Wolf of the North, which was a lie, since she came from a cattle farm outside Carlisle and had never seen snow. Every night she made the leap through the paper hoop, and every night the crowd grew thinner, until there were more empty benches than faces. Old Morrow kept her fed on the last of the gate money and told me a wolf that jumps for her supper will jump for anyone's supper, and I believed him.

The last night we played, the field behind the tent went green as the sea under a sky I had never seen before. Sheets of colour rolled over the Pennines, rose and violet, and the ringmaster stood at the flap with his hat in his hands saying nothing. Sable would not go into the ring. She stood in the wet grass, nose up, and then she gathered herself and sprang, not at the hoop, but over the trampled canvas and out into the dark, her shadow flung long across the orange light until it became the black spines of pines on a hill that was not there.

We never saw her again. The handbills went in the river with the rest of us. But on clear nights, if you stand on the Carlisle road and look north, you will see a wolf running through a forest made of sky, and nobody here is fool enough to call it a trick.