Colour tattoo of a leaping wolf silhouette filled with pine trees and a pink, orange and green night sky with stars, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Wolf silhouette with forest and night sky on the chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A wolf in mid-leap is outlined in solid black ink, with its body filled by a double exposure scene of dark pine trees and a night sky. The sky shifts from green through orange to pink and purple, with small star highlights, and the wolf's tail and legs carry the purple tones. The tattoo sits across the upper chest and collarbone area, and the soft skin tone and surrounding clothing frame it.

Chest Wolf Forest Pine tree Night sky Star Silhouette

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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

Sit closer to the stove, child, the cold on this side of the pass has teeth, and I will not tell this twice. My grandmother told it to me at this same window, with the same frost on the glass, and she swore every word was true because the border guard had seen it himself and never once looked at the wire afterwards.

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The wolf was grey, or she was grey before that night, and she had three cubs on the far slope where the pines grow so thick that the sun gives up by noon. Men from the valley had strung a line of lamps along the fence to keep the wolves out of the sheep, and the lamps buzzed, and the wolf could not abide the buzzing. So she came down to the fence in the dark and gathered herself the way a hare does before it runs, and then she leapt, not over the wire but straight through the place where the light was thinnest.

Halfway up the air she caught the sky. It came down to meet her, green first, like water in a glacier lake, then orange like the coals in that stove, then a pink so deep it looked bruised, and the stars were pricked into the purple of her tail as though someone had sewn them on with a needle. Where her legs stretched out, the shadows of the pines rose up inside her body and stood there, black and certain.

The guard at the post, Anton Vrba, swore she landed on the frontier stone without a sound. She looked back once at the country she was leaving, and then she was over, and the sky went back to being only sky. In the morning there were paw prints in the snow on his side of the line, and only his own boots on the other.