Forearm tattoo of running wolves that move from coloured geometric facets on the left to black dotwork on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Running wolves along a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A row of wolves runs along the forearm from left to right. The wolves on the left are filled with coloured geometric facets over soft watercolour washes, while the middle wolves are outlined with small coloured dots scattered around them. The rightmost wolf dissolves into black stippled dotwork that fades into the skin.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Wolf Animal 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

Sit down, all of you, and mind the cat. The lift has been broken since the spring, so we'll climb the way the wolves did, one step at a time and nobody stopping to admire the view. Fourteen floors up to Mrs Okafor's flat, and every landing had a window with a crack shaped like a river. Those wolves came up through this building the winter the council painted the stairwells grey.

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Four of them ran that night. The first was Brindle, pieced together from the leftover tins of green and blue the decorators forgot, so his coat was all sharp little facets like sea glass. The next two were only outlines, pale as milk, because nobody had given them anything yet. They ran through the ground floor gathering dots of red and orange from the sweet wrappers children dropped on the mat, and every dot that stuck to them was a bit of warmth they kept.

The last one, the grey one at the back, had nothing to start with. He ran through the ninth floor where the bulb had gone, and every landing took a little of his colour and gave him nothing in return. By the time they reached the roof he was only dots, a fine black spill of him over the railings, and the others were so bright they never once looked back. Some nights the wind still carries him past the windows.

So when you hear something light on the stairs after midnight, don't reach for the switch. That's the grey one, still climbing, still carrying the rest of us up. Now, who wants the next floor?