Black and grey pencil drawing of a woman with closed eyes wearing a wolf head, flanked by two roses and a skull within an ornate frame.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with wolf headdress, roses and skull

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a woman with her eyes closed, crowned by a snarling wolf's head, with long wavy hair falling around her shoulders. Two detailed roses sit either side of a shaded skull at the base, and the whole composition is enclosed in an ornate scrolled frame. The work uses fine graphite shading in black and grey, with dense hatching on the hair and fur and softer tones on the skin.

Neo-trad Realism Woman Wolf Rose Skull Frame 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

In Skerrow the fishermen said the wolf had come down off the moor the winter the Haddock Mary went under. Nobody saw it take anything. It simply sat on the harbour wall at dusk, grey as wet slate, watching the boats come in with their lamps lit, and when the men counted their crews at first light it was always one short.

Keep reading

Hanne Rask kept the chandlery at the top of the slip. On her windowsill sat a skull her father had carried home from a wreck off the Scarrow reef, the bone gone yellow and the jaw wired shut with copper. Every evening she set two red roses from her yard beside it, one for each son the sea had kept. She did not believe the wolf was a wolf. She believed it was grief walking on four legs, and she told the harbour master so.

The harbour master laughed and offered her a shilling for the skull. She refused. In February the wolf came up the slip itself, past the drying nets, and sat on her step. It did not snarl. It lowered its great head so she could see the grey in its muzzle, then turned and padded back down to the wall. Hanne understood. She lifted the roses from the sill, pinned them to her shawl, and walked down to the water.

The boats came home that night, every one. In the morning two fresh roses lay on the harbour wall, wet with spray, and no wolf was anywhere to be seen. Nobody in Skerrow counted a crew short after that. The skull stayed on Hanne's sill, facing the sea, its copper wire still holding the jaw shut.