Black ink drawing of a bison, with its front half realistically shaded and its rear half built from faceted geometric panels and dotwork, on a white background.

Geometric bison design in black ink

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A bison is drawn in pen and ink on paper, with a realistic, finely hatched head and shaggy front half. The rear half breaks into angular geometric facets with hatching and stippled dots, and small triangular shards drift away from the body. Dashed arcs and thin arrows cross the composition, and the drawing is entirely in black and grey.

Geometric Dotwork Geometric Arrow Animal

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

Sit closer, the lamps are low and the trams have stopped for the night, so there is nobody left to hear us but the gulls on the chimneys. You want the bison of Carrick Street? Then listen. Every winter it came down from the hill park where the iron gates never shut, and it walked the cobbles with its great shaggy front end, all wool and temper, the way a bull walks when it has been told it cannot pass.

Keep reading

The night the rain turned to sleet, a boy named Tobias Quill was carrying a sack of ledgers across the tram lines. Something on the far side of the square made the bison lift its head. Its back half was already changing. The stone of the old tannery wall had got into it, or the cold had, and the flanks went to angles, facet after facet, hatched like slate and dotted like frost on a window. Where the hide should have swung, there were only planes, sharp as cut paper, and the pieces began to peel away and hang in the air like struck glass.

Tobias did not run. He had been raised by a mother who sold thread, and thread teaches you to follow a line. He watched where the shards fell, and he saw they all fell in one direction, down the long dashed arc that cut from the gutter to the bridge. The bison followed that arc too, every step, until it reached the river and stood there with its head low, shaking a beard of frost. Then the pieces stopped drifting. They locked, one to the next, and the animal was whole again, if a little lighter.

So when you cross the Carrick bridge tonight, count the stones. If you find one that is not quite square, leave it be. That is where the bison rests its shoulder.