Black and grey snarling wolf head tattoo on a forearm, built from fine linework and dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling wolf head on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf head with bared teeth, a open mouth and a pointed ear fills the forearm. The image is built from fine hatched linework across the fur, with stippled dotwork shading on the nose, tongue and muzzle. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, centred in the frame with a cream sweater sleeve at the upper left.

Dotwork Traditional Forearm Wolf Animal head Teeth Fur

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

The bailiff nailed the notice to the lych gate on the morning the frost came down, and by noon half of Ashcombe had walked past it to stare at the drawing. A wolf's head, snarling, with a price beneath it in good black ink. You stood at the back of the crowd with flour on your sleeves and thought the artist had never seen a wolf up close. The mouth was too wide. The eyes were too kind. Nobody else seemed to notice the kindness, which is why nobody else thought to ask where the bailiff had got it.

Keep reading

The truth lived past the stile, where the beeches thickened into the Rother wood. Your grandmother had left you the cottage there, and the she-wolf who had whelped under its woodpile three winters back had never once taken a hen. She came when you whistled the two-note call, sat in the cold with her grey coat steaming, and bared her teeth at strangers the way a neighbour raises a hand. That was all the snarl had ever meant: keep off my ground.

On the fourth night the bailiff's men came with lanterns and a dog that did not want to be there. You heard them before you saw them, boots snapping through the rime, and you went out with the bread knife in one hand and the heel of yesterday's loaf in the other. The wolf stood between you and the trees. She showed them everything she had, lip lifted, every tooth white in the lantern light, and the men stopped at the stile as though a wall had grown across it.

They went home by the road in the end, cursing the bounty and the cold. In the morning the notice was gone from the gate, and so was the wolf, though her prints ran off east towards the moor. You kept leaving the loaf on the woodpile anyway. Some mornings it was still there, and some mornings it was not, and the village has never been able to tell you which of the two makes it a fair trade.