Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a howling wolf with geometric leaves on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Howling wolf and geometric leaves on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a wolf with its head raised and jaw open in a howl, drawn with fine outlines and stippled dot shading. Angular geometric leaves and sharp diamond shapes extend from the left side of the wolf, framing it. The design is entirely black and grey, and the composition sits across the forearm with the wolf's head toward the elbow.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Wolf Howling wolf Leaves Geometric shape Diamond Foliage

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 Marjorie,

Keep reading

The lodger in number four has stopped asking me about the wolf, which is a mercy, because I had run out of ways to say it was the wind. He came down to breakfast on Tuesday with his collar turned up and told me he had heard it three nights running from the cliff path above the old lime kiln, a long note that rose and broke off just short of the top. I told him it was the gorse whistling in the gaps of the fence. He looked at me the way the gulls look at the bins.

I have been thinking about the carved panels in the back parlour since, the ones Mr Pike put up the year before Dad died. You remember them, the angular leaves cut from pale oak, each one pointed like a folded letter, with diamonds stacked up the side like rungs on a ladder nobody uses. Mother called them his bad joinery. I always thought they looked like something that had grown in a hurry and then been told to stand still. Last night I sat with my tea beneath them and listened, and nothing came from the cliff at all, which somehow was worse.

This morning I found the lodger's sketchbook left open on the hall table. He had drawn the kiln, the path, and a wolf with its head flung back and its jaw wide, the fur done in a fine spray of dots as if it were made of frost. Around its throat he had drawn leaves, sharp as cut tin, climbing towards the sky. Beneath it, in small careful capitals, he had written IT ANSWERED ME. I have not told him I read it. I have simply put the kettle on and left the parlour door ajar.