Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf headdress woman with peonies and skull

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a woman seen in profile, with long flowing hair and a wolf's head resting over the top of hers. Two peony flowers and leaves frame the figure on the left, and a skull sits at the lower edge. The linework is fine and detailed, shaded with hatching and dense parallel strokes, and the image is entirely black and grey on a white background.

Botanical Wolf Woman Peony Skull Leaves Profile Flower Hair

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

You arrive at Mrs Quayle's boarding house in Skelder Bay in October, when the season is over and the donkeys have been walked off the sands. She gives you the room above the kitchen because it is the only one with a stove that still draws. Each evening the wind comes up the cliff path smelling of wet peat, and each morning the back yard is full of peonies, great heavy heads of them, though the frost has been down for a week and nothing else in Skelder would dare to flower.

Keep reading

She tells you at breakfast that her husband planted them the summer before the pier fell into the sea, and that they have never once listened to the calendar. You ask about the grey wolf people claim walks the top of the cliff. Mrs Quayle only pours your tea and says the wolf came down off the moor the winter the lifeboat was lost, and she has been keeping watch over the dunes ever since. You laugh, and then you stop laughing, because you have walked those dunes yourself and found the skull there the day before, half buried in marram grass, its long jaw still full of teeth.

You carry it into the kitchen wrapped in your scarf. Mrs Quayle takes it without a word and sets it on the windowsill beside a book of pressed petals, and she looks at it for a long time. In the morning she hands you a cloth bundle and tells you to put it back where it lay, before the tide turns. On the cliff path the wolf is waiting, grey against the grey sky, and it lowers its great head as though to let you pass. When you turn around at the gate, the step behind you is covered in fresh peony petals, and the yard is blooming red as a wound.