Black geometric wolf head tattoo with dotwork and blackwork shading on the upper arm, with small touches of pale teal.

Geometric wolf head on the upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A faceted wolf head faces forward across the upper arm, built from angular shards and triangles filled with solid black, stippled dots and hatched lines. The eyes and nose are rendered in dense black, while the fur outlines are drawn with fine spiky strokes. Most of the ink is black, with a few small patches of pale teal adding a light accent against the pale skin.

Geometric Dotwork Blackwork Upper arm Wolf Animal head Animal portrait Eye Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The commission arrived on a Tuesday, folded into the frame of a drawing: a wolf's head, but made of planes, as if someone had taken a hammer to a mountain and found an animal inside. Marta pinned it above the bench and read the notes twice. Her father had taught her to score glass with a diamond wheel and never to hurry the break. He had also taught her that a straight line in glass is a lie you tell with patience.

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The window was for a chapel at the top of Harrow Lane, where hail had stripped the lead from the east wall two winters back. The client wanted the wolf in dark glass for its eyes and nose, hatched lines for the fur, and only a few pieces of pale teal, the colour of the sea off Scarhouse Point. Marta had a box of that teal in the back store, salvaged from a bottle works that closed before she was born. She cut each shard by lamplight, scoring, tapping, snapping, and every triangle cost her an hour of thinking about where the next one would fall.

By the third week the wolf lay across the bench as a fitted jigsaw, black and grey and the cold green-blue of the coast. Only the last piece remained, a teal sliver for the left ear. She set it in with a dab of putty and stepped back. In the lamp's yellow light the glass made the animal look past her, out of the workshop, towards the lane and the chapel where nobody had come to collect it. Marta wrapped the window in sacking, wrote the address on it, and left it by the door for the morning van.