Pen and ink drawing of a tattoo design showing a snarling wolf, coiled snake, rosary and red mandala, in a neo-traditional style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wolf, snake and mandala tattoo design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn design shows a wolf's head with a snake coiled around its neck and body, a beaded rosary with a cross hanging from it, and a pair of clawed hands at the top. A red and black mandala-like flower sits behind, with two small diamond-shaped letter panels at the sides. The linework is bold and dark, with grey wash shading on the wolf and snake and flat red fill on the petals.

Neo-trad Wolf Snake Rosary Cross Mandala Flower Hand Claw Diamond Letter

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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

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Court remembered who had put the wolf in flat 14C, only that the lift smelled of wet fur from the Tuesday after the power cut. Mrs Okonedo swore she had seen it come up the back stairs with a rosary hanging from its jaw, the little silver cross swinging against the banister rail. Her son laughed and said it was a dog. Then the snake came, a grey one as thick as a drainpipe, and it lived in the bin chute and went up and down the building at night, looking into kitchens.

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The wolf did not hurt anyone. It sat out on the balcony with its head thrown back and howled at the flats across the car park until the lights came on behind the curtains, one window after another, and people stood in their dressing gowns and listened. Those who had lost somebody, a husband in the ground at Eastfield, a daughter who had moved to Leeds and stopped ringing, found they could sleep once it had sung. The snake wound itself round the wolf's throat like a scarf and said nothing, which the old men in the lobby took as agreement.

In the spring the council sent a man with a clipboard to condemn the block. He stood in the car park beside the red painted rosettes of the estate's flowerbeds and looked up at the fourteenth floor. He saw only a dark balcony and a pair of long grey hands resting on the railing, as if someone very patient were waiting for him to finish. He wrote down that the building was sound. It was the only report he ever wrote that he could not explain to his wife.