Black and grey dotwork chest tattoo of a howling wolf on a rock beneath a full moon, moon phases, pine forest and mountains, placed across the chest.

Wolf, forest and moon phases on a chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A howling wolf stands on a rocky outcrop in front of a mountain, with a full moon and a row of moon phases above. A dense pine forest runs across the chest on either side, with stars scattered in the sky. The work is built from fine linework and stippled dots in black and grey ink, with the shading lightest in the sky and mountain.

Dotwork Chest Wolf Forest Mountain Moon Moon phase Pine tree Star Rock

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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

The night the wolf came down from the ridge, my father was counting the moon. He stood at the kitchen window with his cup going cold, tracing the phases on the glass with one finger, the way he'd done every month since the mill closed. Full, then waning, then the thin paring that the almanac said was the old moon, dying into the dark. He said the forest kept time better than any clock in Harrow Bridge, and I believed him, because I was nine and the pines behind our allotment went up forever.

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The wolf was nobody's. Mr Pell at the post office swore it had taken a lamb off the Dunmere farm, and Constable Gale walked the lane twice with a torch and found only prints that stopped at the rocks. We went up Scarr Hill on the Sunday, my father in his good boots, me carrying the bread. From the outcrop you could see the whole valley laid out under the mountain like a map someone had stippled with a pen, every pine a small black stroke, every star still hanging in a sky that had not yet decided to be day.

We didn't see the wolf. We saw where it had been: a dent in the frost on the highest stone, and a single grey hair caught in the lichen. My father crouched, turned it over with his thumb, then tucked it into his waistcoat pocket without a word. On the walk home he stopped at every bend and pointed up at the sky, naming the moon's shapes as though they were people he expected to meet. He never said what he'd seen. He only said the wolf had been howling at something it had lost, and that it had the good sense to let the forest hold on to it.