Four black and grey dotwork wolf head designs arranged in a grid, each decorated with intricate ornamental patterning.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four ornate wolf head designs

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four wolf head designs arranged in a two by two grid on a white background. Each wolf is rendered in fine stippled dotwork and detailed linework, with ornamental patterns, feather-like shapes and decorative motifs filling the head and surrounding areas. The designs are entirely black and grey, with strong contrast between dense dark areas and open white space.

Dotwork Wolf Wolf head Ornament Feather Pattern

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

Dear Aunt Vesna, I am writing this by the stove in the relay house at Kestrel Pass, where the wind has been trying to get through the shutters since Tuesday. You will not believe what the old carter told me last night. He says the wolves that come down from the high forest are not wolves at all, but the grandmothers of the wolves, who kept their feathers when they came down from the sky and grew tired of carrying them. He pointed to the pattern on the door of the stable, a sort of knotted crest with eyes in it, and said that every wolf of that country wears its ancestors' plumage somewhere under the fur, and that a clever wolf can tell which feathers belong to whom by counting the swirls.

Keep reading

I laughed at him, of course, until the morning. A grey bitch came to the yard before dawn with a bundle of quills tangled in her ruff, and when she turned her head I saw that the feathers were not in her coat at all but drawn right into the skin of her face, pale ink-coloured lines fanning out from her eyes like wings folded flat. The stable boy, Teodor, who is only twelve and has never once been frightened of anything, went white and held out the bucket for her without a word. She drank, looked at me for a long moment, and walked back into the pines.

Teodor says she was counting me. He says that if she had found the feather I carry in my own collar she would have led me up the mountain, and I would have come back a different kind of man. I have checked my collar twice this morning. The feather is still there, grey and ordinary, a goose quill from the post office in Brest. I have decided to keep it, and to write you more when the snow lets up.

Your loving nephew, Anton