Two forearms shown side by side with a watercolour-style tattoo of a howling wolf, a bare tree, a flying bird and a yellow moon on the forearms.

Wolf, tree and bird across two forearms

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spans both forearms, with a black silhouette of a howling wolf on the left arm and a bare tree silhouette in a pale circle above it. On the right arm, a black bird flies over a yellow moon with another bare tree. The shading is soft and washed out, with loose grey and black wash, splashes of teal and orange, and bold silhouettes framed by curved, abstract bands of colour.

Forearm Wolf Tree Bird Moon Silhouette Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass for nine days when the wolf started calling from the ash tree behind the stables. Ebba, who kept the inn at Tallow Gap and had not been afraid of a beast in forty winters, stood at the kitchen hatch with a ladle in her hand and listened. The sound was low and long, climbing and breaking, and every dog in the valley answered it.

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Her grandson Pell, nine years old and certain he was a man, said the wolf was only hungry. Ebba told him wolves did not sing for supper. They sang, she said, when they had lost something they could not carry. She took a heel of rye out to the yard in her shawl. The moon had slid out from the cloud like a coin pressed into black cloth, and there the wolf sat on the drift by the trough, grey as the snow, his breath going up in the cold. He did not come nearer. She set the bread down and went back inside.

At first light the bread was gone. A crow sat on the gatepost, sleek and watchful, and out in the lane the carter's mule stood with the carter lashed in his blankets across its back, alive and half frozen, the pass open behind him where the wind had finally turned.

Ebba watched the crow lift off towards the bare tree on the ridge. The wolf rose from the snow and followed it, and for a long while the branches held the pale moon while the drift below them kept no tracks at all.