Two geometric tattoos on skin: a blue and purple panda with faceted outlines on the shoulder, and a black line-work origami-style elephant on the upper arm.

Geometric panda and elephant tattoos on the upper arm

Geometric · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The top photo shows a geometric panda made of angular facets, with thin pink and purple outlines on the left and filled blue on the right, sitting across the shoulder. The lower photo shows a black single-line geometric elephant with folded, origami-like planes, with a slightly soft fill-free outline and a trunk curling downward. Both designs sit on smooth skin against a plain or outdoor background.

Geometric Fine line Shoulder Upper arm Panda Elephant Origami Triangle

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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

You fold the last squares under the sodium lamp at the bottom of Canal Street, where the night buses idle with their doors open and nobody is in a hurry to leave. The paper is cut from the back pages of a seed catalogue, the kind that used to come through letterboxes in March. A boy with a skateboard under his arm wants a fox, so you give him a fox, then a heron. When the rain starts and the pavement shines like the inside of a shell, you begin a panda, blue side up.

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Panda folds are forgiving if you trust the valleys. Crease hard, let the flat planes decide where the head goes. The woman who taught you on a ferry years ago said every animal is already hiding in a square and you only have to stop folding it wrong. She said the same about elephants, which are harder, because an elephant needs one long unbroken fold for the trunk. Lift your thumb once and the trunk comes out a stub, a sulk, nothing a child would take home.

At half past one a woman with wet hair stops at the stall and asks for something that won't need unfolding. You tell her nothing stays folded in this city for long. She takes the elephant, the single-sheet one with its trunk curling toward the kerb, and turns it over in her palm like a coin. She asks what it is made of. You tell her it is the same paper as everything else: a shopping list, a letter, a promise written on the back of a timetable.

When the stall is packed away you find one square left over. You set it on the edge of the bus shelter and walk home past the bridge. By morning the bin men will have taken it, or the wind will. Behind you the lamps blink on along the towpath, and somewhere out past the locks a paper elephant is still walking the wrong way down the road.