Solid black stencil design of a panda with flowing swirl shapes behind it, shown on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Panda stencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a panda sitting or crouching, with its face, ears and limbs picked out in white negative space. Swirling, flowing black shapes curl around the body and along the back, giving a stylised, decorative outline. The image is monochrome and centred on a plain white background.

Panda Bear Swirl

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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

The panda came down the ladder to the galley at two in the morning, the way it had most nights since Rotterdam, and Dorrie Fenn let it have the rice bucket on condition it kept its back to the stove.

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Nobody aboard the Harriet Lusk had signed for a bear. The manifest listed bolts of cotton and forty drums of lamp oil, and the mate, Halvard, had written the stowaway into the log as cargo under protest. Sunday, as the deckhands called it, ate like a card sharp, sorting grains into neat piles and pushing the stray ones back in. Dorrie reckoned it was the only honest crew member on board.

The trouble came off the Cape, when the swell kicked up and a tin of black treacle went over the galley floor. Sunday slid through it on its haunches, curling and turning, and left a trail of loops that dried tacky on the boards. Halvard came down at dawn, took one look and called it a chart. He said the old navigators drew the sea like that, all currents and spirals, and a ship could follow a sticky trail home if it had the nerve.

Dorrie scrubbed for an hour and kept one loop. She cut it from a biscuit tin lid with her paring knife, the swirls standing proud where the black had been, and nailed it above the stove. When the Lusk raised the Thames in March, Sunday was gone over the side at Gravesend, and its shape was still there in the tin, ears and pale face left open to the light.