Pencil sketch of a wolf howling up towards a large full moon, drawn on paper with faint construction guidelines.

Howling wolf and moon sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a wolf seated upright with its head tilted back and its muzzle open in a howl. A large circle, drawn as the moon, sits behind the wolf's head and shoulders, and faint rectangular guidelines frame the composition. The linework is light and sketchy, with soft shading on the fur and tail, and the image is in greyscale.

Wolf Howling Moon Sketch Animal

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 compass point had gone through the paper twice before Ruth Caddick would call the moon round enough. She pinned the sheet to the drawing board with four brass tacks and sat back on her stool while the light from the yard window slid down the wall of Hollins and Son's sign shop. Mr Hollins wanted a wolf for the new delivery vans, something the town could point at from the road. He had seen one in a picture book about Canada and thought it looked clever, which was as much as he knew about wolves.

Keep reading

She drew the frame first, the way her father had taught her to lay out a headstone: a tall box, a line across at the height of the eyes, a centre line down the spine of the page so nothing could lean. The wolf went in last. It came easily once she stopped trying to make it a dog with ideas. It sat back on its haunches with its throat to the sky, because that is the only way a wolf can sing at something it cannot reach.

Mr Hollins came back at five with his hat in his hands and his glasses pushed up on his forehead. He said the lines showed. He said it looked unfinished, like a job the apprentice had walked away from. Ruth told him the lines were the bit that held the picture up, and that she would rub out nothing. He grumbled about the van paint and the cost of cutting a new stencil, and she let him grumble, because she knew he would pay for the thing as it stood.

When the yard was dark she held the sheet to the lamp. The pencil circle was faint where her hand had lifted, the open mouth was a small black smudge, and the box around them all looked like a window someone had forgotten to close. It was the only part of the drawing that did not move.