Black and grey wolf head tattoo on the forearm, realistic shading on one side and ornate floral mandala pattern on the other.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf head with mandala half on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wolf's head in profile, with its left side rendered in soft realistic shading and its right side filled with an intricate floral and mandala-style pattern. The realistic half uses fine gradients to show fur texture and the amber-toned eye, while the ornamental half uses dense linework and small repeated flower motifs. The design sits on the inner forearm against a plain light background, with the ink in black and grey only.

Realism Botanical Forearm Wolf Wolf head Mandala Flower Ornamental pattern Animal

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 came down off the spoil heap the week the Ashdown shaft flooded, and nobody in Harrow Row believed me when I said it walked beside me from the pithead to the chapel steps. My mother had her hands in the wash tub and no time for a boy who came home soaked to the knees talking about animals. 'Coal dust does things to the eyes,' she said, and that was the end of it.

Keep reading

Nan Ivy didn't laugh. She made bobbin lace for the draper's in Lowcross, sheets of it pinned to a foam pillow with a hundred and forty pins, each pattern a sum she'd worked out in her head before she touched a thread. When I described the wolf she put down her bobbins and asked which side of its face had been clear. The left, I said, the side with the eye. 'Then the other side's the lace,' she said. 'Wild things always want a border. It's how you know they're finished.'

She died at Martinmas, and I forgot about the wolf until the frost came in January and I went back up to the spoil heap with her old pattern book in my coat. The snow there had frozen into ferns and loops, the same loops she used to call sorrow stitches. The wolf was standing where the path bent. Its left side was grey and ordinary, its breath steaming. Its right side was all lace, every frost crystal set in rows like pins in a pillow.

It looked at me with that amber eye and didn't move. I understood then that it had not come down to frighten anybody. It had been waiting for someone to finish the edge. I took off my glove, pressed my palm to the frosted lace and felt it give under my hand like thread coming tight. When I got home my mother asked where I'd been. 'Up with the wolf,' I said, and for once she didn't tell me about my eyes.