Black tribal-style design of a howling wolf head above twisting interlaced lines, drawn on a white background with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal howling wolf design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black tribal design shows a wolf head tilted back in a howl, with the jaw, teeth and eye areas filled with dense, patterned black shapes. Below the head, several long, thin, interlaced bands taper and curl downwards, forming a ribbon-like tail. The image is a flat line-and-fill drawing on a plain white background, with no skin or body visible.

Blackwork Wolf Howling Tribal pattern Ribbon

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 bell at Corran Ford had not rung since the winter the wolves came down off the fells, so when the ringer's boy ran up the lane shouting, nobody believed him. They went up anyway, because the king had nailed a silver penny to every doorpost that year for anyone who could say what was calling from the high ground.

Keep reading

It was a wolf, grey as lead, standing on the bare crown of Hollin Fell with its head thrown back. Its howl did not sound like grief. It sounded like a thread being pulled tight. Wherever the sound went, the valley's old knots came loose: the rope on the ferry, the stitches in the bridge, the bound ends of every river cord the millers had tied against floods. Mist began to curl down the slopes and wrap the chimneys of Corran Ford like grey hair.

Ada, the miller's youngest, was the only one who climbed past the cairn. She had her mother's red ribbon in her hair, and the wolf watched it the whole way up. When she stopped, it lowered its head and spoke in her father's voice, which was the worst thing she had ever heard. "Give me the knot that holds you here," it said.

She had no idea what it meant, so she untied the ribbon and held it out. The wolf took it gently between its teeth and wound it through the mist until the strands drew into a single cord, then let it fall down the fell like a plumb line. The valley went quiet. Next morning the bell rang once, badly, the mist was gone, and the miller's daughter came down with her hair loose and the torn end of the ribbon in her fist, which she never tied again.