Wolf within a runic circle

Black and grey · Flash

A black wolf head in profile faces right, with its ears, eye and jaw defined by solid black shapes against white. Curling lines suggest the wolf's mouth and fur, and the figure is set inside a circle of white space. A bold black ring of runic characters encloses the whole composition on a plain white background.

Wolf Rune Circle Animal Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ingrid had carved nineteen runes before the bride's father noticed the mistake, and by then the hall was loud with mead and the smell of roasting lamb. She knelt on the cold flags of the byre with the bone-handled knife still in her fist, the ring of letters around the wolf's shield half finished. Someone had told her the wolf was for the groom's clan, a grey beast who ran the north wood and never let a hunter near enough to see its eyes. The error was small, a single upright where a crossbar should have been, but the old woman who taught her the marks would have rapped her knuckles for it.

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She sat back on her heels and looked at the work. The wolf's head was turned toward the door, jaw open as if it had caught a scent on the wind, and the circle of letters ran around it like a fence of thorns. She had cut the whole thing in one long afternoon with dust in her eyelashes, and nobody had asked her to make it pretty. They only wanted it to hold.

Then she thought of the ear she had shaped so its tip curled back on itself, and how the groom's mother had gasped at it that morning, laying her palm flat on the wood as though it were warm. Ingrid had not meant it as a blessing. She had only grown tired of straight lines.

She took the knife, found the faulty stroke, and widened the upright into a proper crossbar, letting the blade bite deep. When the groom came to fetch the shield into the firelight, the ring would read true from every side and the wolf would face the door as it was meant to. Nobody else would ever know which rune had been wrong, and that, she decided, was the only kind of mistake worth keeping.