Black and grey pen drawing of a wolf's head merging into a raven's wing, framed by a diamond outline and bare branches, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Wolf and raven wing design in a diamond frame

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A wolf's head in profile merges with a dark raven wing that sweeps down the right side of the composition. The fur and feathers are built from fine hatched and stippled pen lines, with solid black areas defining the wing tips and shadows. A thin diamond outline and sprawling bare branches sit behind the figure on a pale grey background.

Blackwork Geometric Wolf Raven Wing Feather Branches Diamond Geometric frame

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 wolf found the raven at the crossroads where the dead thorn trees stood, one wing folded wrong beneath her like a letter badly creased. Nobody had come down that road since the well went dry, and the wolf had walked it for three days with his tongue as dry as paper.

Keep reading

"You are going to eat me," the raven said, "or you are going to ask for something. Be quick about it. The sun is coming up."

The wolf said he was not hungry for birds. He had come for the road itself, which he had been told ran to a town on the far side of the salt flats, where the water was kept in iron tanks behind a gate. The raven laughed, and the sound cracked like a dry branch. She said the road had no far side. Every traveller who had tried it had come back to the crossroads in the end, and each had left a feather behind as payment.

The wolf looked at the wing. It was black from the shoulder to the tips, and the tips were torn to points like broken knives. He thought of his own grey pelt, which he had never once considered a thing that could be given away. Then he lowered his head, took a loose feather from the sand between her claws, laid it across the broken wing, and held it there with his teeth while the sun climbed.

By noon the feather had knit itself into the wing. The raven lifted, flat-winged and heavy, and said the wolf now owed her a road. Was that a fair trade? He did not know. He ran east along the cracked track with the thorns scratching his flanks, and ahead of him the salt flats shimmered like a sheet of tin. Somewhere behind him a black shape turned slow circles over the branches, keeping count.