Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a howling wolf on a forearm, with a mountain range and bare trees filling the wolf's body.

Howling wolf with mountain and trees on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf sits with its head raised in a howl, drawn as a solid black silhouette that fades into stippled dots at the neck. Inside the body, a mountain ridge and leafless trees are outlined with fine lines and shaded with dots. The tattoo is in black ink and greys, shown on the inner forearm against a plain light background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Wolf Howling wolf Mountain Tree Bare tree Silhouette

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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

Sit yourselves down on the bench, and mind the wet on the slats. The wolf in this tale was neither grey nor kind. She lived on the far side of Harrow Ridge, where the bracken grows higher than a man's head and the frost stays in the hollows until May.

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Every evening, when the last light slid off the stone of the ridge, she would sit at the edge of the wood, lift her muzzle and howl at the mountain. Nobody knew why. The shepherds said she was calling her pups, which the drovers had taken the winter the old oaks came down. The mountain never answered. It only kept its shape, grey and sharp, and the bare trees along its shoulder stood up like the ribs of a boat with no water under it.

One October a boy called Tom Ashby came up the lane with a spade and a sack of bulbs for his mother's garden at the foot of the slope. He heard her howl, and instead of running home he climbed onto the wall and howled back, badly, like a gate hinge. The wolf stopped. The mountain, so the story goes, gave the sound back twice over, once from the crag and once from the valley below, and the bare trees shivered as if someone had opened a window.

So if you hear a howl tonight from over the wall, don't be frightened. It is only the wolf asking the hill whether it remembers her. And the hill, being a hill, takes its time. Now, who wants the last of the cake?