Black dotwork drawing of an eagle in flight, with a forest of pine trees, a wolf and a moon shown within its wings and body, drawn on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eagle in flight with forest and wolf

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stippled black ink drawing of an eagle with its wings spread and talons extended. The bird's wings and body are filled with dots that reveal a night scene of pine trees, a wolf walking along a ridge and a pale moon. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with a fine liner pen placed beside the drawing.

Dotwork Eagle Bird Pine tree Forest Wolf Moon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, girl, the lamp only keeps one of us warm. You want the bird, not the boat? Then listen. Forty days out from Lerwick, with the wind dead and the water flat as slate, an eagle came down on the bowsprit and would not leave. Grey-backed, heavy in the shoulder, its wings spread so wide they blotted out the sun. My mate swore the sun had gone out behind them, and I'll not argue, because the eagle had a pale moon sitting in the hollow of one wing, round as a coin, and under that moon a whole forest was growing out of its feathers.

Keep reading

Pine, black and narrow, climbing up the bird's flank in rows like the teeth of a comb. Along a ridge drawn across its belly walked a wolf, the way wolves walk when they own the dark. Nobody aboard had seen a wolf in these isles for a hundred years, and nobody had seen a forest out past the rock either. Yet there it was, rolling over the bird's breast like weather. Every time a man looked straight at it, the dots shivered and it became only a bird again, and then he'd look away and the trees would come back.

On the fortieth night the eagle lifted from the bowsprit, slow as a tide, and the wolf went with it, trotting down the ridge into the dark. I went to the rail to watch them go. The moon rose out of the bird's wing and hung a while over the water, and that's the last I saw of either. Next morning there were pine needles on the deck, wet with salt. The captain said they came off the rigging. My mother kept a sprig of them in her Bible until the day she died.