Tattoo of a robed saint holding a small bird, with a wolf and a lamb at his feet, in muted red-brown and grey shading on a forearm.

St Francis with wolf and lamb on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A robed, bearded figure resembling Saint Francis stands in a long hooded habit, holding a small bird near his chest and a cross or staff in one hand. A wolf stands at his right side and a lamb lies on a rocky base at the foot of the design. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft red-brown and grey shading in the robe and light unshaded areas left for the lamb and bird.

Forearm Robe Wolf Bird Cross Rock

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 wolf came down off the scree above Lowick in the second week of February, and by the time the shepherds reached the wall it had taken four ewes and a lamb still wet from the birthing. Ulf Haddon swore on the church door that he would have the hide off it before Lent. Nobody in the valley argued with him, though a few of them glanced toward the hospice at the ford, where Brother Matthias kept his bees and fed the carters for nothing.

Keep reading

Matthias went up alone the next morning with his staff and a sparrow asleep in the fold of his sleeve. The bird had fallen from a nest under the eaves in autumn, and it would sit on no one's knuckle but his. He found the wolf in a hollow below the crags, gaunt along the ribs, its coat stiff with frost. He did not hurry. He sat on a flat stone, set the sparrow on his palm, and talked to the wolf about the price of salt and the badness of the Lowick road, the way his mother had talked to the cows.

The wolf's ears went flat, then slowly lifted. When the sun cleared the ridge it crossed the snow and lay down against his knee, shivering. Matthias broke the heel of bread he had been saving for his supper and shared it on the stone. When Ulf came up the path with two dogs and a club, he found the friar sitting with his back to the rock and a wolf's head on his thigh, and beside them, unsteady on its legs, a lamb the men had written off a week before.

The wardens docked the bread from the wool tithe and paid Matthias a penny a day to keep the wolf fed, which the men agreed was cheaper than a dead ewe. By Candlemas it slept by the hospice hearth with its nose under the sparrow's cage, and the sparrow, which had never once been afraid of anything, perched on its back as if it were a fence post.