Black and grey ornamental drawing of a wolf head built from dense, intricate patterned linework, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental wolf head design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head faces forward, with its ears, eyes, snout and fur formed from dense swirling and blade-like motifs. The linework is fine and layered, with heavy black fills and areas of hatching that create contrast across the face. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain white background, with the head centred and filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Wolf Animal head Ornamental Tribal pattern Linework

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 rain has been coming sideways since the bell at the top of the market went for nine, and you have pulled the tarpaulin tight over the trestle twice. Under it, the prints lie in rows on baking trays, each one a wolf you cut from a single block of pear wood over three weeks of nights. Mrs Oyelaran from the fish stall has asked for the big one three times, and each time you have told her it isn't finished, which is true, though not in the way she thinks.

Keep reading

The block sits on the table now, wrapped in a tea towel. You unwrap it and the wolf looks up at you, mirror-reversed, as it always does before the ink goes on. Every line is a gouge mark: the swirl of the ruff, the spiked ridge along the brow, the fine hatching where the shadow pools under the jaw. You meant it to be a wolf made of pattern, the way a shield might be made of knots. Somewhere around the fourth week the pattern began to take the animal over, and you stopped trying to stop it.

A boy in a yellow cagoule stops at the stall, water dripping from his hood onto the trays. He asks if the wolf is hiding in the picture or if the picture is hiding the wolf. You tell him you don't know yet. He nods as though that is the right answer, then points at a blade-shaped curl near the muzzle and says it looks like a tooth.

After he goes, you lay a sheet of paper over the block and press the baren down, slowly, in circles, the way your father showed you in a shed that smelled of linseed. You peel it back. The rain drums on the tarpaulin and the ink is still wet at the edges, and the wolf lifts off the wood whole, every blade of it, looking out from the paper as though it has been waiting all along to be let out.