White line drawing on a black background of a blindfolded woman reaching towards a snarling wolf, with a sword and the Roman numeral X above, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and wolf with sword and numeral X

Black and grey · Flash

A white line illustration on a solid black background shows a woman with a headband or blindfold and long hair, holding a small heart-like object at her waist while her hand reaches towards a snarling wolf's head. A sword runs horizontally above them with the Roman numeral X beside its hilt. The linework is fine and hatched, with shading built from parallel strokes and dense textures in the wolf's mane and the flames around its head.

Woman Wolf Sword Heart Roman numeral Headband Hair

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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 were the only one in the walled garden that week who did not run. The wolf came over the south wall at dusk, its mane burning at the edges like heath in August, and the gardener's boy dropped his barrow and fled through the glasshouse. You stayed where you were, shears in your apron pocket, your grandmother's tin heart pressed into your palm. She had told you to bury it under the medlar before the first frost, and you had not yet found the courage to dig.

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The wolf stopped at the bench where the gravel path bends. Its breath smelled of cold iron and wet leaves. Above you both, the old sword that had hung on the trellis wire since the war hung level in the air, as if someone had drawn a line across the sky with a steady hand. Beneath it, a numeral was scratched into the stone of the sundial, a tenth mark that your grandmother had always said belonged to no hour at all.

You did what she taught you. You did not shout. You stepped forward slowly and laid your hand flat against the wolf's warm muzzle, the way you would calm a nervous mare. Its teeth were close enough to count. Nothing in its eyes was cruel, only tired, like a creature that had walked a very long way looking for a gate it had once been let through. You held still until the fire in its mane dimmed to embers.

When the wolf lay down among the bean rows, you knelt beside it and dug with the shears, the soil cool and easy under your fingers. You put the tin heart in the hole and covered it over. In the morning the medlar had its first blossom, and the wolf had gone back over the wall, leaving ten prints pressed into the wet earth, one for each mark on the sundial, as if it had been counting too.