Black tribal-style lizard tattoo with a long curling tail wrapping down towards the heel, on the outer ankle and lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tribal lizard on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a stylised lizard with a spiked back and a long tail that curves down towards the heel. The design uses bold solid lines and filled black shapes with patterned tribal-style detailing. The leg rests on white paper on a dark table, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Blackwork Ankle Lizard Tail Tribal Animal

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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

By the third week of August the windfalls under the Discovery trees had begun to ferment, and the wasps had given up on everything else. You were halfway up the ladder with a bucket hooked over one wrist when the wall spoke, which is what Mrs Pryce said it did every harvest if you were quiet enough to hear it. Along the top of the dry-stone bank, a lizard the colour of wet slate was lifting its spiny back one stone at a time, as though counting them.

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Its tail ran off the bank and down into the long grass, thin as a bootlace and twice as stubborn. Mrs Pryce had warned you that the tail led to the old press house, and that nobody should follow it past the third row of trees. Every autumn, she said, some child did, and came back with cider on their breath and no memory of the gate. You had never believed her, but you had never been told why the gate was painted red.

So after lunch, with the sun leaning on the back of your neck, you followed the tail. It threaded between the trunks, dipped under the brambles, rose over a fallen bough and looped back on itself twice, always keeping one stripe of shadow between you and the lizard. At the third row you stopped. The grass there was combed flat in the shape of a curl, and the air smelt of crushed plums and cold iron.

At the tail's end, beneath the last Bramley, there was only a flat pressing stone ringed with circling wasps, and on its face someone had scratched a spiral of barbs that matched the lizard's back exactly. You laid your palm on the warm stone. Up on the wall the lizard blinked, lowered its head and slid back into a gap between the stones, leaving behind one ripe apple, bruised on the underside, that had not been there a minute before. You ate it standing up. It tasted of the sea.