Realistic wolf head with trees on a limb

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic wolf head in profile looks downward and to the left, with fine shading across the fur, ears and muzzle. Bare trees and a soft, pale background sit inside a circular frame, with darker dry brush-like shading at the base. The work is entirely in black and grey, with smooth tonal gradients and strong contrast in the eye and nose area.

Realism Other Wolf Tree Forest

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

Stand in under the tarpaulin, the lot of you, and mind the drip off the fishmonger's sign. Rain is no reason to leave a story half told. Aye, that's the wolf on the board, the grey one with his head turned away, and no, the man who painted him never saw one. He saw the trees.

Keep reading

Harrowgate Lane was all mud then, and the stallholders shuttered their boards against the weather. Old Ada Penhale sold eggs and candle ends, and every winter a grey wolf came down off the fell to sit at the edge of the bare birches. He never took a hen. He only sat with his head bowed and his eyes on the ground, as if he had dropped something there and was too proud to go and fetch it.

One wet November she carried her last basket of eggs to the wood's edge and set it down among the trunks. She spoke to him the way you'd speak to a neighbour's dog that won't come in from the cold. Tell me what you're looking for, she said, and the rain ran off her hood. The wolf lifted his muzzle a little and looked at her with eyes like wet slate. Then he looked down and to the left, toward a frozen puddle where the moon lay, and she understood he was not hunting for himself at all.

She found it that night under the birch roots: a child's iron key on a bootlace, the lad who had gone missing on the fell the autumn before. She carried it back down and hung it on the market post where the weather couldn't reach it. The wolf never came down again. Now, who's for a hot chestnut before the next shower?