Black ink line drawing of a shark built from angular geometric facets on white paper, with two black fineliner pens resting above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric shark line drawing

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A shark is drawn in black ink on white paper, with its body and fins divided into angular, faceted panels. The lines are thin and even, with no shading, so the design relies on the outline and internal lines alone. Two black fineliner pens lie at the top of the frame, and the shark fills most of the composition.

Geometric Fine line Shark Fish Geometric shape Outline

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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

Sit down, sit down, you're letting the damp in. Mind the third stair, it's been loose since the winter the council sold the pier. You'll have had your breakfast already? Then you'll have the story instead, and it costs you nothing but your attention.

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There was a lodger here in the summer of 1958, Mr Aldous Penhale, who took the back room over the scullery because it had the best light for his drawing. He was a surveyor for the harbour board and he saw everything in edges. He'd fold a sheet of cartridge paper into eighths, open it, and cut corners off the sea until it looked like the sea had been put through a sieve. Every evening he sat at that window with his black pens and drew the same fish, a shark, but never the soft one the fishermen gutted on the slipway. His shark was made of planes. Every fin was a wedge of slate, every flank a shelf of ice.

The town said he was mad. Mrs Hocking next door swore the shark had come to him in a dream off the Lizard, and that she'd seen him at dawn down by the breakwater tracing its outline in the wet sand with a stick. Penhale said nothing. He only kept drawing, and each night the lines ran further across the paper until there was no margin left, and the shark slid off the edge of the table and onto the floorboards.

On the last morning of August his room was empty. The bed was made tight, the pens lay side by side on the windowsill, and a single sheet was pinned to the wall. It was the shark, finished, every facet ruled true. Under it, in small square capitals, he'd written: IT ONLY SWIMS WHERE THE LINES ALLOW. I've kept it on that wall for sixty years. Go on, you can look. No, I don't know where he went. Some say the harbour, some say the lines. Mind the stair on your way out.