Pencil sketch of a woman wearing a wolf headdress with feathers, with a rose and pearl strands drawn below, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Woman in wolf headdress with rose design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil or ink drawing on paper shows a woman with long, wavy hair wearing a wolf-head headdress decorated with feathers. Below her, a rose with pearl strands and leaves is drawn in lighter, single-weight outline. The fine, even linework is shaded with hatching and stippling in the headdress and hair, and the composition is shown flat on the page with a desk visible behind.

Woman Wolf Feather Rose Pearl Curly hair Portrait Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wolf came aboard at Stennet Lock the week the ice went out, carrying a rope of pearls and a wolf's head she wore pulled low over her brow, feathers stuck in its ruff. Hal Burrows, who had hauled coal on the Lea for forty years, told her the Marigold was no passenger boat. She told him it did not need to be. She only had to reach Ware before the rose on the lock gate opened.

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There was a rose painted on that gate, though nobody had painted it, and Hal's daughter Nell swore it had been bare the day before. Hal took the pearls as fare and counted them out on the cabin roof in the grey light. Each one was a river stone, worn round and white. He had never known stones to be so patient. By the third lock the wolf sat on the bow with her back to the water and said nothing, and wherever her boots touched the planks, small green shoots pushed up through the tar.

Nell noticed the pearls going first. Every morning the string was one bead shorter, and the wolf would say only that the fare was being paid. At Ware the barge tied up under the willows, and the wolf stepped onto the towpath while the rose on the gate stood in full bloom, red as a struck match. Hal reached for the rope to say something sensible, but she had already gone, and the last pearl lay in his palm, still warm, as though it had been kept close against something alive.