Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a tiger and a wolf in tribal linework with swirls, a star and the kanji for love above, shown without any body placement.

Tiger and wolf tribal design with kanji

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing a tiger's head and a wolf's head entwined over a curled, furred body with a star and spiral motifs. The kanji character for love sits above the figures. The bold tribal linework is shaded in grey pencil with hatching on the tail and haunches, and the drawing is set on a plain white background.

Tiger Wolf Kanji Star Swirl Tribal

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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 closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the fire does not take your ear. Now, the tiger and the wolf. You will have heard they were enemies, and that is only half of it. In the year the salt marsh froze to the reeds, a tiger named Sarun came down from the northern pass with one paw split open on the ice, and she lay down in the thorn hedge at Veyl's farm because she could go no further.

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Veyl kept wolves. Her grey bitch, Ansu, had whelped in autumn and was still wild with milk and grief for the litter the frost had taken. Every night the wolf growled at the hedge, and every night Sarun turned her head away and would not roar. Veyl's grandmother had taught her that a shared silence is a kind of kindness. So Veyl carried a bowl of broth to the hedge, then a second bowl to the wolf, and set them at either end of the yard.

By midwinter the tiger was stitched and walking, and Ansu had begun to lie against the hedge with her nose to the thorns. Nobody saw the moment they touched. What the children say is that on the coldest night the wolf climbed onto the tiger's back, and the tiger curled her great head over the wolf's neck, and they kept each other warm until the thaw. In spring Veyl found a star of river clay pressed into the mud between them, and beside it a spiral of wet fur. She did not ask which of them had made it. Some answers are better left in the mud.