Black and white flash design of a stylised gecko covered in circles, dots and swirls, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Patterned gecko tattoo design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised gecko faces right with its tail curling up and across the top of the image. Its body and tail are filled with solid black outlines, circles, dots and swirling curls, with small leaf-like shapes on the feet. The design is rendered in solid black on white with no greys or colour.

Blackwork Lizard Circle Dot Swirl Tail

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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

Tuesday, and the wall by the compost bin has been crawling with the old lizard again. I counted nine circles on his back last night with the torch, the pale rings where the mortar has gone, and I swear the dots shift position when you look away. Mrs Okafor next door says he is her late husband come back to check on the runner beans. I told her geckos do not hold grudges, though I am not certain of that.

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The curl of his tail is the thing I cannot get past. It ran across the top of the fence in a line of tiny crosses and loops, like someone practising a signature, and this morning it had reached the washing line. I have pegged the sheets out in a hurry before. Today I left them and went to find the black ink pen in the kitchen drawer, the one with the cracked lid, meaning to copy the pattern down before the rain washes the wall clean.

By the time I came back with the pen he had gone. There were only the leaf-shaped marks on the bricks where his feet had pressed, three of them, each one a small spray of dark water-drops, as if he had walked through a puddle of ink and then thought better of it. I drew them carefully on the back of a seed packet. They look nothing like him. They look like the start of a letter I have not yet decided to send.