Black and grey realism tattoo of a howling wolf with a feather below it, across the upper arm and forearm, with a forest scene shaded behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Howling wolf and feather on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf with its head tilted back in a howl fills the upper arm, with a feather extending down towards the wrist. The shading is soft and detailed, with fine hair texture on the wolf and layered grey tones on the feather. The background of the upper arm shows faint, shaded tree trunks, and the person wears a grey sleeveless top.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Wolf Howling Feather Forest Tree

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

The last wolves had been gone from the Glen for two hundred years, which is why Marta Vosk did not believe the call she heard from the lookout hut at four in the morning. She had come up the track in the dark to check the fire ladder, and the sound rose out of the pines below her like a question nobody had asked in a long time. She stood with the torch off and let it finish.

Keep reading

Her grandfather had kept the hut before her. He had kept a tin box of feathers, grey and brown, each one labelled in pencil with a date and a place: Beinn Dubh, the burn at Achnacarry, the ridge above the old sheiling. He said a feather was what a wolf left behind when it chose the trees over the stories people told about them. Marta had thought him soft. Now she took the box down from the shelf and found an empty space at the end, the card still unwritten.

At first light she followed the sound down through the birches to a clearing where the bracken lay flattened in a ring. There was no animal, only a single grey feather caught on a thorn, its edge frayed as if it had been drawn through a gap too narrow for it. She pressed it flat in her notebook. Somewhere to the north the howl came again, closer this time, and the thrush in the alder went quiet.

She wrote the date on the card, then the place, then, after some thought, the word heard. She did not write seen. The feather went into the box beside her grandfather's, and when she closed the lid the whole forest seemed to hold its breath, then let it out in one long note that she felt in her teeth.