Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with wolf headdress and skulls

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey digital drawing shows a woman in profile wearing a wolf head as a headdress with feathers at the side. She holds a long pipe near her shoulder, and smoke curls up the right side of the image and over the lower half. Two skulls sit at the bottom beside her flowing hair, with soft shading and smooth gradients throughout.

Realism Woman Wolf Pipe Smoke Skull Feather Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodger in the back attic paid a month ahead and never asked for the key to the boot room, which suited Mrs Pell, who wore her own key on a string and touched it the way chapel women touch their pendants. He came off the Margate train in September with a canvas holdall and a long pipe wrapped in oilcloth, and a grey feather tied to the strap that the gulls kept trying to take.

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Smoke was the first thing we noticed. It came out of the attic window at dusk and curled down over the slates like a loose ribbon, and by October the whole terrace smelled of something sweet and old, like candles left in a drawer. Mrs Pell said it was damp. I said it was the sea wind working through the chimney. Nobody mentioned the skulls, though the boot room was where he kept them, two of them, bleached and heavy, and he carried them up on Sunday evenings to sit on the sill and watch the pier lights come on.

I was the one who took up his hot water in the end. The door was never locked. He sat at the table with the pipe, smoke rolling round his shoulders, and a wolf's head, grey as sea fog, rested on the back of his chair as though it were waiting its turn to speak. He did not turn round. He said the wolf had been his grandmother's and that she had told him it would lead him home by the smoke. I asked where home was. He pointed the pipe stem at the window, out past the pier to the black water.

The next morning the attic was empty, the bed made tight, the window open. The two skulls sat side by side on the sill with the pipe laid across them, still warm. Mrs Pell never found the key to the boot room, and I have it now. Some evenings I open the window and let the smoke out over the rooftops, and I do not ask it where it is going.