Wolf Tattoo the Reaper

The reaper is a medieval invention

Death has been personified for as long as anyone has recorded anything, but the figure everyone pictures now is specific and comparatively recent.

The hooded skeleton carrying a scythe emerges properly in Europe in the fourteenth century, in the aftermath of the Black Death, when roughly a third of the continent died within a few years.

The scythe is the part worth pausing on, in those older pictures at least. It is a harvesting tool, and the metaphor is agricultural: people as a crop, cut when ready, without malice and without exception. Not a hunter, a farm worker.

This one carries nothing. The hooded figure rides, wrapped in a long red cloak that drags out behind it, sat astride a black wolf that walks forward with its head low and its eyes yellow. Red against black, with a grey shadow under the paws, is the whole of it.

Earlier and other traditions pictured death very differently, often as a guide or a psychopomp rather than a threat, which is closer to Anubis than to this.

The design

5.3 by 7.6 cm, small, suiting a wrist, an inner forearm, an ankle or a shoulder.

Small designs outlast large ones, since there is less edge to fail and less skin movement across them.

See our article on Anubis for the older version of the idea, and the wolf temporary tattoo range.

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