Three black and grey tattoos: a wolf built from overlapping circles on an upper arm, a bear with Roman numerals in a circle pattern, and a realistic owl inside an orbit-style ring on a forearm.

Geometric wolf, bear and owl tattoos in black and grey

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows three tattoos. A wolf and a bear are drawn in fine black linework, with their bodies built from overlapping circles, arcs and construction lines, and the bear includes Roman numerals. The owl is shaded in greys with fine dotwork-like texture and sits inside a thin circle with orbit lines around it.

Geometric Realism Fine line Upper arm Forearm Wolf Bear Owl Circle Roman numeral Orbit

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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

The ledger is under a fallen lintel in the north tower, where the rain has been at it for a century, and you have to lie on your side on wet flags to reach it. Inside, the pages have gone soft as cloth. Someone has drawn a bear in brown ink, its body made of overlapping rings, and beside it a clock face with its numerals crowded into one arc, though the hours run the wrong way round.

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The steward who kept this place, Thomas Ardley, was no clockmaker. He reckoned the sky from the top of the keep with a brass compass and a cracked quadrant, and every night he wrote the stars down the way other men wrote accounts. The wolf in the margins belonged to the southern sky. The owl belonged to the moat, where the birds came up out of the reeds at dusk. Every creature was built from circles because, he says in his last entry, a circle is the only shape that cannot be lied about.

You spend three days copying his figures onto tracing paper while the village children lean over the broken wall to watch. On the fourth night you climb the stair with no rail and sit where he used to sit. An owl drops past the gap in the roof, pale as a sheet, and turns its head to look at you as though it has been expecting a surveyor with a torch.

You trace the last orbit in the dust with your thumb and find, scratched small beneath it, the year the castle fell and one line in his hand: the wolf is still walking, and the bear is only waiting for the hour to come round.