Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a wolf's head with blue, purple, green and red splashes and drips, on the upper arm of a person in a grey vest.

Watercolour wolf head on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A wolf's head faces forward with pale eyes, a black nose and soft, feathered fur edges. Loose washes of blue, purple, green, red and yellow bleed around the head, with paint-like drips running down the lower arm. The photo is taken at an angle on the upper arm, with a grey vest and a partly visible tattoo at the top edge of the frame.

Upper arm Wolf Wolf head Watercolour splash Drip

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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 yourself on that upturned bucket, and mind the weld, it'll stain your good trousers. You want the wolf story. Every dyer on this stretch of river has heard it, and every one of them tells it a little differently about the eels.

Keep reading

The wet spring of the flood year, old Hester Vane had three vats going in the back shed. One night a grey wolf came down off the fen and stood at the bottom step, thin as a rake handle, and watched her ladle woad blue into the cloth. She threw it a heel of bread. It didn't touch the bread. It only looked at her with those pale eyes, so she gave it what she had left over: the woad, the madder, a yellow from weld, and a green she brewed from copper and sour whey. She painted its head on a length of undyed linen, because her mother always said a wolf won't cross running colour.

The paint wouldn't hold still. It ran down the cloth in red and yellow streaks and pooled on the boards, and by morning the cloth was gone from the line, and so was the wolf, and the colour had gone down the drain into the river. The eels came up striped for a week. Fishermen still swear to it, and they'll show you the marks on their hands.

But Hester always said the eyes were the best of it. She never painted them. She left two patches of bare linen for the wolf to keep. The last thing she saw before the shed door shut was a line of wet paw prints across the boards, blue at the front and red behind, heading out towards the fen. Hang your coat on that hook, now. Mind the drip.