Close-up of a black and grey wolf skull tattoo with red watercolour splashes on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf skull on the inner arm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A wolf skull with open jaws and bared fangs fills the frame, drawn with fine engraved-style hatching across the bone. The skull is shaded in dark navy and black, with white highlights along the cranium and teeth. Loose red watercolour splashes sit behind and around the skull against a red backdrop, which makes the composition bold.

Forearm Wolf Skull Animal skull Fangs Teeth Watercolour splash

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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

You want the true one or the one the gulls tell? The gulls lie, so I'll give you the true one, and you'll hold your tongue till the end. There was a keeper called Aggie Dunmore on the Skerry Light, forty years she kept that lamp, and the winter the boats stopped coming she kept it alone. Her husband had gone over the rocks in the autumn gale, and the island had nothing left on it but her, the paraffin, and a grey dog that came out of the sea one morning and would not be sent back.

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Nobody ever named that dog. Aggie called it Tide, because it came and went with the water and never once asked her where the mainland was. In the long dark it slept across the lamp-room threshold like a draught stopper, and when the fog rolled in thick enough to swallow the beam, it went out onto the gallery and howled at the sea until the foghorns of the far ships answered. Sailors swore afterwards they steered by that howl, and I believe them, because I have heard it myself on a still night off the point.

In the February the paraffin ran low and the relief boat did not come. Aggie wrapped her good shawl round the dog's neck and set off across the causeway at low water, sure she could make the mainland before the tide turned. Tide walked ahead of her, nose down, teeth bared at the wind, and where the path went under she stopped, turned, and waited for her to find her footing. Aggie made it. Tide did not need to. Some say the dog was never a dog at all, and that the grey coat she was buried in still had salt on it, and the lamp on the Skerry burned from that night on without a drop of oil.

So when you see a fellow with a wolf's skull on his arm, jaws open at the wrong weather, you know what he has been carrying. Mind your step on the causeway.