Gold tribal design of a howling wolf with a paw print inside a swirling frame, shown as a flat stencil or flash drawing rather than on skin.

Tribal howling wolf with paw print

Colour · Flash

A tribal-style wolf with its head raised in a howl sits above a large paw print enclosed by sweeping, tapering bands. The design uses solid, bold shapes with spiky edges and dotted accents, shown as a single flat gold tone on a white background. The composition is tall and centred, with the wolf's head at the top and the bands curling down around the paw.

Wolf Howling wolf Paw print Tribal Swirl

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 howl came up through the ventilation shaft at ten to three, long and rising, and I put down the drug trolley to listen. Nobody else on Ward Six seemed to hear it. Mrs Harrop in bed nine did, and she smiled at the ceiling like someone hearing a bell she knew.

Keep reading

'That's Ruff,' she said. 'He's late.'

Ruff, she told me, had been her husband's dog before Frank died, a grey lurcher that waited on the car park wall every visiting hour for a bus that never came. Ruff had been put to sleep in March. I checked the chart twice to be sure I'd read the name right.

At half five, when the sky over the multistorey was going the colour of dishwater, I went out to the bin yard for air and found the frost broken by prints. Four toes and a pad, sharp as stamps, crossing from the wall to the fire door at the end of the corridor. That alarm had gone off twice that winter for nothing. It stayed silent now.

Back on the ward Mrs Harrop was sleeping with one hand open on the blanket, and the dog biscuit tin on her locker had its lid off. I pressed the lid back on. Then I wrote the handover, and under concerns I wrote nothing, because there was no box on the form for a thing like that. Quiet night, I typed, and left it there.