Realistic black and grey wolf head holding a red rose in its mouth, shown as a tattoo design on a plain grey background.

Wolf with a red rose in its mouth

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A front-facing wolf head with grey shaded fur, detailed eyes and a black nose fills the frame. A single red rose with a thin stem is held in the side of the mouth, and dark ink splatters run along the base of the neck. The fur is built from fine tonal shading, with the rose as the only colour against the light grey background.

Realism Wolf Rose Animal Stem Splatter

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 is standing in the middle of the Carrow Pass road when your headlights find it, and it does not step aside. Dust hangs in the lamplight behind it. A single red rose is clamped at one corner of its mouth, the stem held as neatly as a cigarette a man forgot to light. You brake hard enough to feel the trailer lean, and through the windscreen the animal regards you with the patience of a creditor.

Keep reading

You know the stories people tell about this stretch. Mrs Okafor at the petrol station swears the wolf belonged to a florist who vanished in the nineties, and that it takes one rose from every car that stops long enough. You have never believed her. Still, when you wind the window down, the air smells of wet ink and crushed petals, and the wolf lets the rose fall onto the tarmac between your wheels, very precisely, as if it had been waiting for a driver patient enough to notice.

You get out. Your boots crunch on grit. The rose lies there with its petals already darkening at the edges, and beside it is the black splash of an old spill that never quite dried. You pick it up. The wolf turns and walks into the scrub without looking back, and the stem is cool and damp in your fingers, as though it had been rinsed in a creek that has not run out here for years.

In the next town you stand the rose in a jar of water on the dashboard. By morning it has opened fully, and you see for the first time the thin dark line of the stem running out past the petals like a road that keeps going beyond the last sign. You never see the wolf again. You do see the rose, every mile, and every mile it seems a little redder than the last.