Flash sheet of eight tribal-style wolf designs in red, blue, green, gold, purple, black and white, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Multicoloured tribal wolf flash sheet

Mixed · Flash

The image shows a set of eight stylised canine designs arranged around a central point, each filled with bold tribal swirls and decorative cut-out patterns. The linework is solid and graphic, with flat colour rather than shading, and the poses vary from running to sitting. The colours are red, light blue, dark blue, green, gold, purple, black and white, set against a plain white background.

Wolf Animal Silhouette

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

Now sit close, because the canal is loud tonight and I won't be shouted over by the lock gates. Eight wolves came down the Cut the winter the ice held till April, and they were not wolves to begin with. They were only paint on the cabin panels of the Marigold Rose, which old Hal Brannock bought off a bankrupt coal man in Stourport for the price of a sheepdog and a kettle.

Keep reading

It was Ada Penhale, the lock keeper's girl, who woke them. She scrubbed those panels with lye on a Sunday, which is the one thing you must never do on a barge, and the red wolf at the top lifted its head out of the flame-shaped swirls and sneezed. The gold one climbed down onto the coal and would not be moved for any money. The black one turned its long head like it was listening for a bell only it could hear. The blues and the green went for the towpath in a rush, and the white one, the smallest, sat on the tiller and watched Ada with its odd, patient eyes.

Hal tried to bargain with them. He offered sugar, a roll of oilcloth, his own tobacco tin. The wolves took the sugar and gave nothing back but the sound of their feet on the wet planks. They ran the whole length of the Severn with him, leaping the weirs, until the barge lay breathing at the sea lock below Gloucester and the tide turned against them.

That's the bit folk get wrong. The wolves did not go back into the paint because they were beaten. They went back because the tide was coming and a wolf must always find the water that carries it home. In the morning Ada found a single white wolf asleep on the bow, dry as a biscuit, and it opened one eye and grinned at her. So she left it there. You can still see it, if you climb aboard at dawn and don't speak until the lock gates open.