Black linework drawing of a wolf head with swirling flourishes, a jewelled brooch and dotted detailing, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental wolf head design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head faces forward, drawn with fine black outlines and dense hatched lines in the fur. Dotted beading runs along the jaw and ears, and a gem sits on the brow, with curling swirls and scattered dots around the outside. The drawing is black ink on white paper, with no colour.

Fine line Dotwork Wolf Animal Swirl Gemstone Bead Dot

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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 night the cage stuck at four hundred feet, my mother took the brooch off the mantelpiece and pinned it to my jumper, the way you'd pin a name tag on a child lost at the show.

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It was a silver wolf's head, no longer than my thumb, with a beaded edge that ran along the jaw and up under the ears like a string of wet peas. Grandad said the wolves had run these fells before the lead men came and dug their dens out from under the moor. A pit captain had bought the brooch from a tinker in Alston, and when he died it went to his widow, and when she died it came to us, because my mother was the only one who cleaned the chapel brass without being asked. The stone on its brow was red, the colour of a lamp through a pit window, and it never once looked dull.

We stood at the shaft head with the other women, our breath standing in the lamp light, listening to the pipe where the men knocked to say they were alive. Somebody's little boy kept asking if the wolf could see down the hole. My mother said nothing. Each time the knocking came it was fainter, and then it came again, and I counted every knock on my fingers until I ran out.

They brought the men up in ones and twos. Dai Pritchard came first, then the Halloran lads, then the last cage held only my father, grey to the eyebrows with dust. He stepped out, saw the brooch on my chest, and took it off me with fingers that wouldn't close properly. He turned it over under the lamp. The red stone had warmed in my jumper, and he held it there in his palm for a long while, the wolf's beaded face looking up at both of us.