Black and grey dotwork chameleon tattoo with mandala-style patterning on the outer upper arm or thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chameleon with mandala patterning

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A chameleon grips a thin branch with its curled tail coiled below it, and the whole body is filled with mandala-like rings, scales and radiating shapes. The linework is fine and the shading is built from dense dots and stippling, giving a textured, engraved look. The tattoo is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the design is centred on the skin with plenty of space around it.

Dotwork Geometric Other Lizard Mandala Branch Spiral Scale Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit still, the lot of you, because this is the true one, the one about Mr Abernathy's lizard and the Easter bazaar. You'll not believe me, and that's fine, because my own mother didn't either, and she was standing there with a tea urn in her hands.

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Abernathy kept a chameleon in a glass case behind the post office counter. Nobody in Hallam Cross had ever seen one, so the whole town came in to look. It sat on a thin dead branch he'd cut from the chestnut by the chapel wall, and it changed to whatever it was near. Green on the leaves, grey on the counter, and once, when Mrs Fell leaned too close with her spectacles on, it went the colour of her good cardigan, and she swore it winked at her.

Then came the bazaar. The Women's Guild had spent a month on the lace doilies, every one stitched in rings and stars and little scalloped petals, and they laid them out on the trestle tables under the chestnut. Abernathy carried the case down to show them. When the lid came off, the chameleon walked out onto the nearest doily and simply stopped being a lizard. Its tail curled into a spiral, its body filled up with rings, and every scale took on a stitch. Nobody could say where the lace ended and the creature began.

We searched until dusk. Mrs Fell found the tail wound round a tent peg, looking like a pattern waiting to be unpicked. Abernathy never got the thing back, not properly, though he swore that on wet evenings the chestnut bark still showed faint spirals, as if a creature had decided once to become the town's needlework and stay.