Watercolour-style wolf head tattoo on the upper arm, with black ink splashes, grey shading and orange eyes.

Watercolour wolf head on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A wolf's head faces forward across the upper arm, with its eyes picked out in orange and its face built from black and grey washes. Loose ink splatters, drips and streaks spread beyond the outline, and small patches of blue and orange add colour around the muzzle and brow. The composition is fairly tight, with the head filling the upper arm and the splashes fading out towards the edges.

Upper arm Wolf Animal Splatter Watercolour

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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

You are three weeks out of Hull when the ink goes over. The tin of lamp-black slides off the chart table in one roll that a lesser ship would not have survived, and by the time Mr Okafor has the wheel steady the whole back of the wheelhouse is dark with it. He swears in two languages and then laughs, because the cook has come up the ladder holding a sodden sheet and wants to know if it can be saved.

Keep reading

It is the crest. You drew it on the back of a manifest in Antwerp, when the owners asked for a wolf to replace the old bird on the funnel, a grey head with orange eyes that you meant to paint properly once you found a steady bench. The ink has bled through the paper and the wolf has run into a smudge, one ear gone, the muzzle dissolved into a dark tide. You stand there with a rag in your hand, ready to scrape it off, and find that the smudge looks more like something that could cross a frozen field than the careful drawing ever did.

The storm holds for four days. You work in the galley with the stove door open for light, dropping thinned paint and seawater onto a spare sheet and letting it run where it wants. Captain Dunmore comes down on the third morning to see what you are doing and stays longer than he means to. He asks whether the owners will recognise their wolf. You tell him the sea drew it and you only held the brush steady enough for the eyes.

At Tilbury you roll the sheet into a tube and hand it over in the customs shed. The clerk unrolls it under the lamp and frowns, then looks up at you, then back at the page, where the two dabs of orange you put in last night still catch the light like something awake in the dark.