Black and grey engraving-style tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, with a wolf, skeletons, a bird, an eye, a snake and a crescent moon.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Engraved skeleton and beast scene on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, showing a wolf or dog leaping at a skeleton, a winged bird beneath a single eye, a coiled snake, two skulls on a skeleton figure, moths and a crescent moon in clouds. The linework is fine and engraving-like, with stippled dotwork shading and radiating hatched rays. The image is in black ink and grey tones only, arranged in a vertical composition down the arm.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Wolf Skeleton Bird Eye Snake Skull Moth Crescent moon Cloud Smoke Rope Flame

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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

You hear the dog before you see anything. Pilot, the lurcher from flat fourteen, has learned to shoulder the fire door open, and by the time you reach the ground floor he is already at the bins, hauling something pale and clattering out from behind them. It is not a bag. It is a skeleton, wired together by some student's careless hand, and when Pilot shakes it the bones swing like washing.

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The security lamp over the drying green has drawn its usual crowd of moths, and above the rooftops a thin moon has slipped out between the clouds. Somebody on the sixth floor is burning something on a balcony barbecue, and the smoke rolls down past the washing line, where a rope still hangs slack between two poles. Mr Okafor from the council says the rope is a health and safety matter. You have always thought it was simply a rope.

You follow the dog up the stairs, past the lift that has been out since March, past the landings smelling of bleach and fried onions. On the eleventh floor the skeleton is sitting against the wall with its skull tipped to one side, wearing Mrs Adeyemi's green cardigan. Pilot stops, looks at you, and sits down beside it as if this was always the arrangement.

You take the rope end from the skeleton's bony fingers and tie it off to the radiator. Below, the city breathes its orange glow through the rain. You sit on the cold step with the dog's head heavy on your knee, and you wait for the moon to come back out.