Cartoon monkey tattoo with black outlines and brown and white shading on the lower back, shown upside down with its bottom raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon monkey bent over on lower back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon monkey is tattooed upside down on the lower back, with its tail curling at the top and its face and limbs forming the lower half of the design. The linework is bold and dark, with brown shading on the fur and white highlights on the face and hands. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin, with a waistband visible along the bottom edge.

Back Monkey Cartoon Tail

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

Nobody at the Hartsbridge reunion will say who drew the monkey, though everyone knows it was you. It was 1998, Mr Pell's double chemistry, and you had bent the corner of an exercise book page so the little creature could hang upside down from the margin, tail curled like a question mark, grinning with his eyes screwed shut. Pell held the book at arm's length and asked the class who the artist was. Nobody moved. That silence was the first thing you ever got right under pressure.

Keep reading

Twenty-six years on, the caterer's table is a sea of lanyards and warm white wine. Rachel Mott, who sat behind you and never forgave you for the Bunsen burner, shuffles over and asks whether you still draw. You say mostly for a bloke in Otley who wants his delivery van decorated. She laughs, then stops, because across the room Pell is coming in on a walking stick, grey cardigan buttoned wrong, and he is looking straight at you.

He doesn't say hello. He unfolds a sheet from his jacket, soft as cloth from years in a drawer. It is the monkey, the original, the corner still bent. Underneath, in cramped capitals, he has written: KEPT IT. BEST THING IN THAT CLASS. Then he adds a line you did not expect. He says he used to scribble in the margins of marking himself, before the school made him stop.

You fold the page into your pocket and go back to the table, where the urn is ticking. Rachel asks what he wanted. You tell her he wanted his monkey back. She says it was never his. You say no, it was always the room's, and you spend the rest of the evening redrawing it on a napkin, tail first, while the monkey looks up at you from the crumpled programme, still grinning, still upside down.