Black and grey ornamental wolf head tattoo with a third eye motif on the upper arm, in a blackwork and dotwork style.

Ornamental wolf head on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf's head fills the upper arm, framed by ornate patterned panels and a mandala-like design. A third eye sits on the forehead above the nose, and the fur is built up from fine lines and stippled dots. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a dark t-shirt sleeve and a dark background around it.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Wolf Wolf head Third eye Mandala Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward's daughter had been digging under the chapel floor for three days when the grey wolf came up out of the ditch and sat down beside the hole as if it had been asked. Its fur was cut into patterns, leaves and scales and small round dots like frost on a window, and in the middle of its brow a single eye stood open, dark and wet. Nell kept digging. Her father had called the castle empty since the roof fell in, and the village had carried off its stones for their walls, but nobody had lifted the chapel flags, and nobody had asked what the wolf was guarding.

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Under the last flagstone was a wooden box bound in iron, and it was not full of gold. It held a ledger in a dead lord's hand, every loan and every field and every debt the villagers had put their marks to over sixty winters. Nell read the first page aloud by the light of her lantern, slowly, the way her mother had taught her to read the parish book. The wolf listened with its third eye half closed. 'Read it all,' it said. 'Read the names.'

So she read until the lantern guttered, and when the last name was spoken the wolf stood, shook the dust from its ruff, and walked through the broken arch. Far below the chapel Nell heard chains rattle, then go still. By morning the ledger lay in the ash of the hearth, and the village woke to find its boundary stones back along the river, each one set where it had stood before, each one furred with new moss.

Nell walked down the hill with her lantern unlit. At the bottom of the ditch the wolf's prints were already fading in the frost, every one ringed with tiny dots, and she followed them as far as the water before the frost took them too.