Watercolour and ink drawing of a howling wolf below a glowing moon with blue and pink washes, drawn on white paper as a tattoo design.

Howling wolf and moon watercolour design

Mixed · Flash

A wolf with its head raised and jaws open howls towards a pale moon ringed in blue and magenta. The wolf is rendered in loose grey wash with dark, sweeping ink lines through the fur, while the moon and surrounding swirls use soft blue, pink and purple watercolour with splashes and drips. The composition is vertical, with the moon at the upper left and the wolf filling the lower right of the sheet.

Wolf Moon Howling Watercolour Splash Swirl

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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 Hoy ferry was forty minutes late out of Stromness, and Isla Drever sat in the wheelhouse with her boots on the console, watching the moon climb out of the sea-smoke. It came up blue at the rim, a cold ring of light with a magenta flush behind it, the colour the sky turns when the fishermen say weather is coming. Her grandfather called that ring the moon's bangle and said it meant a northerly by morning.

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Sixty-odd years back, he had worked the same run with a deckhand called Eck Rendall, who sang when the engine was quiet and swore he could hear seals answering him from the Pentland side. Isla found Eck's logbook in a biscuit tin under the chart table last spring, its pages swollen with damp. Most entries were tide times and the weights of crates. But on the night of the big storm, in pencil gone silver, he had written only: Sent her a howl off Stroma. Heard one back. Two ways of saying the same thing, now.

The radio crackled with the mainland office asking for her ETA. Behind the static she heard a long note rising from somewhere out on the black water, thin and wavering, not a seal and not the horn.

She didn't answer the radio. She slid the wheelhouse window open, let the wind take her hair, and sent the low note back across the Firth until the ring of the moon went white and steady, and the answer came again from the shore.