Black dotwork and geometric linework tattoo of a wolf head split down the middle, set in front of a mandala, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric and dotwork wolf head on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf head fills the centre of the design, with its left half rendered in stippled dotwork shading and its right half in angular geometric lines. A linear mandala of petal-like shapes sits behind the head, and two small diamond and arrow-like shapes hang below it. The tattoo is done entirely in black ink, with the shading built from dots and the outlines from fine, even lines.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Wolf Mandala Geometric shape Arrow Diamond

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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

Sit down, boy, and mind the pot, because the lamp's guttering and I'll not tell this twice. Thirty winters back, the Marigold Rose went out of Hull with a cook called Ada Penhallow at her stove, and a wolf nobody had paid for riding in the bread locker. She was a grey cub the fishermen had pulled from a creel off Dogger, half-starved and all teeth. Ada fed her scraps and named her after the sea, which was a daft name for a dog, but she answered to it.

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The trouble started with the navigator, a thin man called Cosmo Haig who drew his charts with a ruling pen and a ruler he never once let out of his sight. He liked to sit in the galley for the warmth and watch the animal. One night he set his dividers on the table and said the beast was neither one thing nor the other, all soft shadow on one side and hard angle on the other, and that the world was built the same way. Ada told him to go and chart something useful. He sketched the wolf on the back of his star tables anyway, with the compass rose behind her head like a sunburst.

Here's the turn. When the Marigold took water off Spurn, Haig went down with his charts, and Ada found the sketch folded in her apron pocket. She pricked the soft side of the drawing into the cub's shadowed pelt with a needle and lamp black, dot by dot, the way her mother had marked the sails. The sharp side she left to Haig's lines. Two little diamonds for the stars they'd lost, and an arrow pointing home.

So that's your wolf, boy. Half kind, half clever, and both halves fed from the same pot. Now pass me the ladle before it boils over.