Black line drawing of a tattoo design showing a woman with a crescent moon, peony flowers and a snarling wolf, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and snarling wolf design line drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black linework drawing on tracing paper shows a woman's face with a crescent moon on her forehead, surrounded by flowing hair and peony blooms. A snarling wolf head with open jaws and detailed fur strokes sits in the lower half, with beads or a pearl strand running beside it. The design uses bold outlines with fine hatched shading and no colour.

Neo-trad Woman Wolf Moon Peony Flower Bead 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

The wolf came down to the harbour the week the peonies on the manse wall burst open, and Morag Lennie was the only one awake to see it. She was mending a creel by the lamp when the breathing started at the door, long and patient, like a bellows left going in an empty forge. She did not look up. Her grandmother had told her that the moon on a woman's brow was a door, and that whatever came through it at night wanted to be fed or spoken to, and never both.

Keep reading

The beast did not come in. It sat on the step with its jaws open and the sea light on its teeth, and it waited while the moon rose over Ben Scarra and silvered the strand of pearls the minister's wife had lost in the spring. Morag knew the beads at once. They lay in the wet weed below the slipway where the tide had left them, and she had walked past them twice that week, pretending she had not seen them.

She gathered them into her apron and carried them out. The wolf lowered its great head and let her loop the strand over its ruff, careful as a seamstress at a hem, and then it turned and walked back up the hill towards the peat banks without once looking behind. In the morning the minister's wife found her pearls on the kirk gate, wrapped in a single wet petal, and she never asked where they had been.

Morag kept the lamp lit for the rest of the winter. The wolf did not return, but every spring after that, a white flower opened on the manse wall before any other, and nobody on the island thought to pick it.