Blue tribal-style shark tattoo design with white and black ornamental swirls and a toothed open mouth, shown as a drawing on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue tribal shark design

Colour · Flash

A shark drawn in a tribal style, facing up and to the left with its mouth open to show rows of teeth. Solid black and white linework forms swirling ornamental patterns across the body and tail, and the fins are filled with blue shading. The design is centred on a plain white background inside a thin black border.

Shark Fish Tribal pattern Swirl Teeth

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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

Leave the gate open, love, the tide likes to hear the hinge. You asked me about the shark that came up the lettuce rows at Tregarrow, and I'll tell it the way my mother told it, sitting where you're sitting with a bucket of bean poles between my knees.

Keep reading

It was the summer the pump house flooded and the bay came up as far as the cabbages. Old Jory Pascoe, who kept the glasshouse, swore he saw a fin cutting through the sweet peas. Nobody believed him until the thing itself came nosing along the wet path, blue as a mussel shell, its skin scored with black and white swirls like the knotwork on the church pew ends. It stopped under the medlar and opened its mouth, rows of teeth as white as the lime I'd spread on the path, and it did not bite a soul. It only breathed out a long cold sigh that smelt of kelp and rain.

Jory said it wanted the bay back. My mother said it wanted its pattern read, because every curl on it was a tide line, a ripple, a place where the water had turned. So they sat in the garden all night, the shark and the two of them, tracing the swirls with wet fingers until the sky went the colour of its fins.

By morning the flood had drained. The shark had gone, but the pattern stayed in the mud of the path, black lines curling where it had lain, and the gulls would not walk across them. Jory pushed a cane beside each curve and called it the garden's first map. He's under the medlar now, and I'm the only one left who can still read it.