Pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing a woman's face framed by flowing hair and feathers above a wolf or lion head, with a butterfly below, drawn on translucent paper.

Woman, wolf and butterfly design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on translucent paper shows a woman's face with flowing hair and feather-like forms, set above a wolf or lion head with a mane. A butterfly with striped wings sits beneath the animal's chin, and fine strands run down from the muzzle toward it. The work uses soft graphite shading and fine outline, with no colour, and the composition is symmetrical and centred on the vertical axis.

Woman Wolf Lion Butterfly Feather Hair Sketch

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

You have been on your knees at the galley range since four bells, scrubbing the same black stain the cook calls a hearth tradition. The fog has sat on the Verity for three days and nobody asks anymore when it will lift. Above the stove, tacked to the bulkhead with a bent nail, hangs the drawing the carpenter left behind at Valparaíso: a woman's face spilling into a mane, a lion's head beneath her chin, and a striped butterfly resting where a beard should be.

Keep reading

Nobody aboard knows who drew it. The cook says it came from the second mate's sister, the second mate says it came out of a bale of tracing paper bought in Liverpool, and you keep your own opinion while you peel potatoes. Each night you wipe the grease from the paper with the corner of a tea towel, careful not to smudge the graphite, and each morning the lines look a little firmer, as if someone has been working on them in the dark between watches.

On the ninth day the fog tears open and there is a second ship off the starboard bow, close enough to read her name. Her galley chimney smokes the same way yours does. You climb the ladder with the iron ladle still in your fist, and the wind drags the mist off the water, and when you look back down through the hatch the butterfly is no longer on the paper. The graphite beneath the nail is pale and smooth, as though the wings had simply lifted away to see the other ship for themselves.