Two palms turned upward showing black symbol tattoos across each finger and a black and grey wolf head tattooed on each palm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symbol fingers and wolf heads on hands

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest palms up on white paper, with a black and grey wolf head shaded across each palm. Each finger carries a column of bold black symbols with rune-like and glyph-like marks, drawn in solid, even linework. The ink is entirely black and grey, and the close, straight-on framing shows the full pattern across both hands.

Hand Wolf Wolf head Animal head Symbol Glyph Finger Palm

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

Aboard the Greywater, nobody trusted a log kept by daylight. Old Tobiah Crane kept ours in the wood of the figurehead, a grey wolf with its jaws open over the bowsprit, and every mark he cut was a squall, a bell, or a man gone over the side. By the fortieth day out of Valparaíso the carving had grown a column of symbols that ran down the wolf's forelegs and into the planking, and he would run his thumb along them as if counting rosary beads.

Keep reading

I was the cook's boy then, and he set me to copy them into the ledger. "Never put down a mark you cannot say out loud," he told me, so I learned them the way a child learns psalms, one hard shape at a time. One meant the wind backing west. One meant a hand lost to the rigging. He said the wolf had no use for paper and would keep the true count itself.

In the fifty-third week the wind dropped to nothing and the men began to whisper that the wolf had gone hungry. Crane sat on the bowsprit and did not speak for two days. On the third morning I found a new mark cut fresh into the wood, sharp and clean, and I could not say it aloud because I did not know it. It was a small circle with a line through its heart. I went to him and asked what it meant.

He looked at it for a long time. "That's the Pembroke light," he said, and his voice cracked like old varnish. "Someone's counting us home."

The wind came up from the north that evening, and by the ninth bell we could smell turf smoke off the Cornish coast. I took the chisel from the cook's drawer and cut my own mark beneath his, a small mark for the boy who had learned to read the sea, and the wolf kept it with the rest.