Black and grey realism tattoo of a wolf's head on a forearm, with dark silhouettes of a bird and another animal set against clouds below.

Wolf head and silhouettes on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf's head, looking forward with pale eyes, fills the upper part of the forearm, with fur rendered in fine soft strokes and smooth shading. Below it, dark silhouettes of a bird and a second animal sit against a hazy, cloud-like background. The image is in greyscale and the tattoo is framed close, with the arm running diagonally through the frame against a dark backdrop.

Realism Forearm Wolf Animal Bird Silhouette Cloud

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

No, sit down, the lot of you, the bread isn't ready and neither is my story. Hush now and pass the salt. Winter came over the pass the year the bridge washed out, and it came with a grey wolf walking ahead of it, the way a lamp goes before a man. Old Tamsin at the Crooked Hart saw it from the window, standing in the drifts with its head up and its pale eyes fixed on her door.

Keep reading

Tamsin had a son who'd gone over the ridge after the cloud geese, and the geese had flown south without him. Every evening she set a bowl of broth on the sill. Every evening the wolf came and sat, and the crow that roosted in the eaves came down for the crumbs, and the hare from the lower field hopped up to see what all the fuss was about. The village thought it was a foolish woman feeding strays. Nobody thought much of Tamsin either, and that was her way of keeping the peace.

On the ninth night the cloud came down thick and grey, so low the inn vanished into it. The bowl stayed full. The wolf didn't come. Tamsin took her lantern out into the white, calling her boy's name, and somewhere past the wall she heard the crow cry twice, then a hare's thin scream, then nothing at all.

Come morning, the drifts had been trodden into a path straight as a ruled line, climbing to the ridge. At the top the crow sat on a cairn with a woollen cap under one foot, and below it the wolf lay in the snow, watching the valley with its ears pricked, calm as a dog at a farmhouse door. Tamsin went back down and filled the bowl. Some nights, she said, the thing you feed is the thing that finds what you've lost, and that is all the sense I can make of it, so pass me the bread.