Black and grey realism tattoo of a howling wolf with smoky shading and maple leaves, placed on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Howling wolf and maple leaves on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A howling wolf with its head tilted back rises from soft, smoky shading that fades into the skin below. Maple leaves in grey and black trail down the lower side of the design, with a few small scattered leaves and specks. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, with smooth gradients and fine detail in the fur and leaves.

Realism Botanical Ribs Wolf Howling wolf Maple leaves Leaves Smoke Shading

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 generator coughed twice before Eddie got the lights up on the Dragon Coaster, and by then the wind had already stripped the maples along the lay-by. Leaves came over the wire fence in handfuls, red going to brown, and skidded under the caravans as if they wanted in out of the cold.

Keep reading

Aunt Dot sent him round to the ghost train because the fog had quit halfway through the afternoon. Behind the painted doors the backdrop still showed a wolf on a ridge, its muzzle lifted at a moon somebody had painted in a hurry in 1987. Its outline had flaked to grey, and the lower half of it had gone to a smear where the damp got in. Eddie found the fog machine under a tarpaulin, primed it with the spare canister, and thumbed the switch. Smoke rolled out low across the boards, thick and slow, and curled up over the painted ridge.

From beyond the fence, out in the spinney, something howled. It was long and thin and not much like a dog. Eddie stood still with his hand on the cold metal of the machine until it came again, and then a third time from further off, as though it was following the last one down the hill.

He kept the fog going until the leaves had caught in it. They drifted through the smoke and settled on the wolf's flank, and in the dim bulb light the shape of its head seemed to lift and tilt back, as if it had been waiting all year for the wind to bring the autumn in. Eddie switched the machine off at midnight. In the morning the trucks pulled out for Tewkesbury, and one maple leaf was stuck to the inside of the cab window where Dot had left it, pressed flat against the glass.