Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a wolf with crystal shards and an orange moon, on the upper arm.

Wolf with crystal shards on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A wolf with raised fur and a crown-like crest stands in front of an orange disc with a thin dotted outline and soft clouds. Its body dissolves into angular, faceted shards in purple, teal and dark grey. Bold black outlines and smooth colour blends sit against the skin of an upper arm, with the design filling the arm from shoulder to elbow.

Neo-trad Upper arm Wolf Moon Crystal Cloud Crest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror ball at the Palais in Gateshead has been dark since March, and you are the only one who still climbs the ladder to check its hooks. Tonight the moon through the skylight is the colour of a peach stone, and the band has packed up early because the bassist swears the fiddle has started to howl.

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Grey Sal from the cloakroom is the first to see it. The wolf comes up through the boards beside the stage, not fast, shaking off something that rings like struck glass. Its crest catches the light the way cut lead does, and wherever its feet touch the sprung floor the planks split into facets, purple and teal and slate, as if the hall were a lantern being slowly unpacked. Nobody screams. Sal just switches off the cloakroom lamp and waits.

It crosses the floor to you and sits, then lifts one heavy forepaw onto the edge of the stage in the manner of a man asking for a dance. The old ledger in the office says the ballroom was raised over a winter den, and that the owners paid a fiddler to keep the windows closed on the first night of each new year. You never believed it. You believe it now, because the shards are climbing the velvet curtain behind you, cold and bright, and the wolf is waiting.

You take the paw. The band starts up again without being asked, the fiddle bowing on its own, and you lead the wolf out across the floor while the mirror ball relights one bulb at a time above you. By dawn the boards are full of small violet splinters that the cleaners sweep into dustpans, and every one of them, when they tip it into the bin, comes back up the hall to sit at the foot of the stage.