Black and grey realism tattoo of a snarling wolf head inside a dreamcatcher with feathers, across the upper back.

Wolf and dreamcatcher on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling wolf's head with bared teeth and narrowed eyes fills the centre of the design, set within a woven dreamcatcher hoop with a feather hanging from its lower edge. The shading is soft and detailed, with fine fur texture, smooth tonal gradients and sharp highlights on the eyes and feathers. The tattoo covers most of the upper back, with the person's neck and loose hair visible above it and a plain dark background behind.

Realism Back Wolf Dreamcatcher Feather Snarl Fur

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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, all of you, for the wind off Harrow Gap does not stop for a story and neither should I. The winter the snow lay three ells deep on the saddle, a wolf came over the pass with its ribs showing like a broken fence. Grey as wet slate, and when it turned its head the eyes caught the firelight the way two coins do at the bottom of a well.

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Now, the widow at Low Scarth had nine ewes and a byre door with no lock worth the name. Her mother had taught her to bend a hoop of green willow, bind it with sinew and lamb's wool, and hang a goose quill from its lower edge, for a hoop catches whatever crosses the threshold at night and the quill tells you where it went. She hung it that winter and went to bed with her shawl on. The wolf came to the door at moonset. It stood a long while, watching the quill turn in the draught, then showed its teeth at the wood and went round to the fold.

Each night it came back, and each night she tied the quill a little lower, as if patience could wear a wolf down. By the thaw the quill hung at the height of her knee, and the wolf sat with its head level with the willow and its breath curling through the gap like pipe smoke. She talked to it then, the way you talk to a dog that will not come in. She asked what it hunted that could not be found in the valley, and it only held her gaze until the cock crowed.

In the spring she found the quill snapped clean and lying in the mud by the gate, and caught in the knot of the hoop a single grey hair, long as a finger. The ewes were all there. The wolf was not. Her grandson swears the hair is still in the willow, and that if you climb to Harrow Gap at dusk you will hear something in the wind counting what it is owed. Now, bed, the lot of you.