Black ink drawing of a wolf head filled with geometric and floral patterns, shown on white paper beside a Sharpie marker.

Patterned wolf head drawing in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A wolf head in profile, with snarling teeth and a spiked mane, is drawn in black marker on white paper. Its surface is filled with dense linework and patterns, including leaf shapes, zigzags, dots, stripes and flower motifs, set against white negative space. The photograph is taken from above at an angle, with a marker and an eraser visible at the top left.

Wolf Wolf head Pattern

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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

Come closer to the fire, all of you, and mind the wind, because it always comes down off the pass in the last hour before the snow. My grandmother used to say the wolf on the high road was not hungry for flesh. He was hungry for a proper pattern. That is why his mane is cut so close, every scale of it a different thing: a leaf for the summer his mother died, a zigzag for the river that took the bridge, a dotted field for the stars he counted while he waited for the hunters to leave.

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Now a shepherd named Ilse came up the pass one autumn with a bag of ink-stained paper and a black pen she had bought in the lowland town for a single silver coin. She was not brave. She was only stubborn, and she had been told that the wolf would tear the pen from her hand. She sat on a flat stone and began to draw him, and as she drew, she copied everything: the teeth, the spikes, the little flowers she saw growing in the crevices. The wolf came down to the stone to watch. He sat beside her, and his breath smelled of pine and cold iron.

When she finished, he looked at the page for a long time. Then he gave a short bark, which in my grandmother's language means yes, and he went back up into the rocks. Ilse folded the paper in four and carried it down to the valley, where she pinned it above her door. The next spring, the pass was never closed again, and every traveller who passed under that door could see the wolf watching over them, his mane full of patterns.

So when you cross the pass tomorrow, remember to leave a little ink on the stone. He likes to be remembered in the detail.