Black ink drawing of a frog clinging to a branch, its body and limbs filled with dense zentangle-style patterns, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patterned frog clinging to a branch

Black and grey · Flash

A frog with its limbs spread is shown gripping a diagonal branch, drawn in black ink on white paper. Its body, legs and toe pads are filled with repeated looped, dotted and hatched patterns, while the outlines stay crisp and even. The image is entirely black and grey, with the frog centred and the branch running across the top left.

Frog Branch Pattern

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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 hall in Chipping Norton smells of urn tea and floor polish, and the name badge still on the table says Biology in felt-tip. You find the old form register pinned to the noticeboard, your name in Mr Hale's careful capitals, and beside it nobody has ticked anything since 1998. Somebody offers you a paper cup of orange squash and you take it without looking up, because across the room a man in a grey cardigan is holding a plastic wallet over his head like a waiter with a tray.

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In the lower sixth you and Tomasz shared a field-notes book that Mr Hale let you keep in the back of the lab. Every margin filled up with the frog Tomasz drew when double biology got slow: a tree frog gripping a bramble stick, its body packed with loops, dots and hatched lines because, he said, a frog that plain would never get across the road. You added nothing to it. You only ever held the pencil for the toes. Before you left school you made a pact on the back page that whoever went furthest away would keep the drawing safe.

He crosses the hall and puts the wallet in your hands. Inside is a photograph of a real frog on a real branch in an allotment outside Kraków, and on the wooden fence beside it, in marker pen, someone has traced the same looping pattern. Tomasz says he has been adding a fresh branch to the drawing every time he moved house, and the frog has never once let go. You open the notebook at the back page, where the toe pads are still faintly sticky with ink, and you fold it carefully into your coat pocket before the lamps come on in the car park.