Black line drawing of a wolf head wearing a ram skull with curled horns, flanked by roses and hanging feathers, shown as a tattoo design with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf with ram skull and roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head sits beneath a ram skull with curled horns, and two open roses flank the muzzle on either side. Feathers hang from the base of the composition. The work uses dense black linework and hatched shading on a plain white background, with no colour.

Botanical Blackwork Wolf Horn Rose Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ram's skull had been nailed above the wheelhouse door of the Constance Hale since before Tamsin was born, and nobody on Skerrow quay could say who had put it there. Her father called it luck. Her uncle said it was a warning to the herring, which never came to a fleet that looked hungry. Tamsin only knew that on the mornings the wind swung north, the curled horns took the spray and rang faintly, like something tapping to be let in.

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That February the nets came up light for six weeks running. Men stopped talking at the fish market. Tamsin took the early boat out alone, because her father's hands had gone stiff with the cold, and found a grey wolf standing on the shingle at the harbour mouth, watching the boats go out with yellow eyes. It did not follow her. It lifted its head towards the headland, where two wild roses had come into flower on a bank that should not have had them yet, then walked off through the reeds with feathers caught in its ruff.

She went where it had looked. Beyond the point the water ran over a shelf of rock, and the shoal she had been chasing was not there. Instead the fish gathered in a dark seam that moved against the tide, as if they had been waiting for someone to ask. She let the net drop slack and they came to it of their own accord, silver and heavy, until the boat sat low and the gulls screamed at her from every direction.

Back on the quay that evening she pulled a grey feather from the mesh and nailed it beside the skull. Her father, who had never once asked her about the wolf, looked at the feather for a long while, then handed her the hammer and said nothing at all.