Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf, woman and forest spirits design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink line drawing on tracing paper showing a snarling wolf head above a woman's profile, with small round forest spirits and a mask-like emblem with concentric circles. The linework is bold and even with fur and hair rendered in fine hatching, and there is no colour or shading beyond the outlines. The design fills a tall portrait composition with sharp leaf-like shapes at the lower left and a round emblem at the base.

Neo-trad Wolf Woman Mask Emblem Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke, for this is the bit where the old road was lost. Ailsa Gunn was the last one on Scarra who could still hear the trees talking, and she was not pleased about it. The laird's men had come over on the tender with saws and a paper that said the Hollow Wood was timber now.

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Ailsa did not argue. She walked up the hill at dusk with her grandfather's bone-handled knife in her belt and a heel of bread wrapped in cloth, and she sat down on the stump of the first ash they had felled. The wolf came out of the bracken before the moon was up. Its coat was grey as wet slate and its ruff stood out like a hedge in a gale. Behind it, in the hollows of the roots, the little round spirits woke one by one, pale as peeled turnips, rattling their heads the way dried peas rattle in a tin.

The men came up at first light with their saws. The wolf stood in the path and did not move, and the spirits climbed the ropes and the handles and the cold iron of the blades until every tool hung with them like washing. Nobody cut a stroke that morning. When the laird came himself, he found Ailsa asleep against the wolf's flank, and he turned round and took the boat back to the mainland before the tide had finished turning.

Some say the mask still hangs in the byre under three rings of tarnished brass, and that if you lay your palm on it at the turn of the tide you will feel the forest breathe. I have never tried it myself. I have too much sense, and the spirits are very particular about who they visit.