Colour tattoo of a stylised geometric animal with dotwork patterns and circular dot stems on a person's calf, in green, mustard and black linework.

Geometric animal and dot motifs on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stylised, long-necked animal with a crown-like head stands among stems topped with circular dots and triangular shapes. The design uses bold black outlines, fine dotwork and hatched patterns inside the shapes, with a faint dotted circle above the knee. Muted greens and ochre fills sit on a tan skin tone, and the composition runs from just below the knee down the calf.

Dotwork Geometric Calf Animal Giraffe Circle Dot Triangle Stem Leaves

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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

Pass me the teapot, love, and mind the sugar, because this one runs long. The giraffe had been walking the wall of Mrs Abernathy's kitchen garden since the first frost, and nobody in Little Wenham could say which gate it had come through. It had a crown on its head like a bishop's mitre, all ridges and notches, and it stood so tall that the apple tree looked like a child's toy beside it.

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Every morning it went along the rows and lowered its neck to the stems, nibbling the round seed heads that sat on top of them like little coins on wire. Gold ones, green ones, one that was the colour of weak tea. Ada Pell, who ran the allotment and did not hold with animals in the beans, followed it with a broom and a great deal of swearing. But the giraffe only blinked at her from under its crown and went on eating. The triangles on its flanks were the broken glass of the old cold frames, Ada said later, pressed into its coat by a winter storm, and the hatching inside each shape was the pattern of every hedge and fence it had ever brushed past.

One afternoon Ada watched it stop at the lane gate, shake its head, and let a single dot drop from its crown into the mud. She went to pick it up, the way anyone would. The giraffe stamped once and looked at her, and she let it lie. By morning there was a stem as tall as a broom handle, with a green circle at its top, and by Sunday the lane was lined with them, all the way down to the church.

So if you ever find a gold dot in the dirt by a garden gate, leave it be. Let it grow. There's a giraffe somewhere that will come back for its shade.