Black and grey flash design of a yin yang symbol wrapped by a serpent-like form, with a wolf head at the top and feathered wings spreading on both sides.

Yin yang with wolf heads and wings

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil-drawn tattoo design showing a yin yang symbol at the centre, with a serpentine body coiling down from it and a two-headed wolf or dog figure above, one half light and one half dark. Feathered wings with bat-like membranes extend from both sides, and the lower body tapers into a twisting tail of feathered lines. The shading is black and grey with dense hatched feather texture and bold solid black areas, set on a plain white background.

Blackwork Yin yang Wolf Wing Serpent Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ysolde had kept the ferry at Hallow Reach for thirty winters, and in all that time the two hounds that came with the boat had never once agreed about the crossing. The pale one, feathered at the shoulders like a grey heron, wanted the rope pulled before the bell rang. The dark one, whose bat-thin wings folded and unfolded like a closing fan, wanted to wait and watch the water.

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They were not brothers, the carter said, nor were they dogs. They had come up out of the reed beds the spring the old abbot drowned, two heads on one long body that ended in a tail of twisting, feathered threads. Ysolde had stopped asking how it worked. She fed them both from the same bowl and let them sleep on either side of the stove, where the heat stopped at the middle of the floor like a line drawn in chalk.

The autumn the river rose, a stranger in a grey cloak paid double to be taken across at dusk. Halfway over, the pale head lifted and howled, and the dark head answered with a low hum that set the oars shivering in their pins. The stranger's coins went black in his palm and then bright again. "Both or neither," the dark one said, and the pale one, for once, did not argue.

When Ysolde pushed back for the near bank, the hounds were already on the landing, one wet to the shoulder and one dry as paper. The stranger had gone up the hill without his cloak. The river lay perfectly still between the posts, and neither of the hounds looked back at the water.