Black and grey dotwork and blackwork wolf head with a feathered crest, snarling with bared fangs, tattooed on the side of a torso over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling wolf with feathered crest on ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf head in profile, with bared fangs and a crest of feather-like plumes behind the ears. The fur and muzzle are built from fine stippled dots and dense hatched lines, and the lower jaw breaks into jagged feather shapes. The design is in black and grey and fills the ribcage area of a shirtless torso against a plain grey background.

Blackwork Dotwork Ribs Wolf Snarl Fangs Feather Crest Animal head

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

Come nearer, the lot of you, the fire's sulking and I won't shout this twice. The Halloran and Dunne Travelling Circus was dying the winter the wolf stopped eating. Everyone blamed the damp in the caravans. Mrs Pryce, who sold the tickets from a card table by the gate, blamed the ringmaster's plumes, the great fan of ostrich feathers he wore every Saturday until the moths got into them and the hooks rusted through.

Keep reading

The wolf was called Ottoline, and she had come up from a farm near Carlisle as a cub in a hessian sack. She never did a trick in her life. She sat on her box and snarled at the children, and the children loved her for it, the way children love a thing that refuses to be petted. Her teeth had gone yellow. Her ribs showed under her coat like the struts of an umbrella.

On the last night in Settle, the ringmaster, Tobias Dunne, climbed into her cage with a bucket of raw mince and a face like wet paper. He said he was done pretending. He said the circus would be sold by Easter, the ring to a shopping centre, the lions to a zoo in Wales. Ottoline lifted her lip at him, and he laughed until he cried, because she had always been the only honest thing in the place.

Then she opened her mouth wider than anyone had seen, and the whole tent seemed to breathe out through her, a sound like a gale coming off the fells. The next morning the cage was empty and the gate was open, and somewhere up on the tops a wolf was singing for the first time in her life.