Black and white line drawing of stylised, interlocking beasts arranged in two vertical columns, suggesting a tattoo design sheet.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised beasts in a vertical line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows several stylised animal figures, some with curling manes or crests, stacked down two vertical columns on a plain white background. The linework is bold and mostly outlined, with areas of solid black patterning and fine hatched detail on the bodies and heads. It is monochrome with no colour, and the figures are cropped at the edges, which suggests a sleeve-style design.

Animal Beast Creature

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit closer, the fire won't carry your ears to the far end of the felt. Right. So the beasts went down to the river in a line, one standing on the back of the next, the way you'd stack pots on a cart when the road is bad. The bank was narrow and the ice was breaking up in grey plates, and nobody wanted to be first. The top one was a grey stallion with a mane that curled like smoke off a pinched wick. He said he had crossed rivers before, which was true, and that the others should wait for him to be quiet, which was not.

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The striped one in the middle had a shoulder patterned black and white like a bird's wing, and a crest that caught the wind. She carried the small dog on her back, the one who had followed them from the last camp, and she did not put him down for anyone. Below her was the heavy red-maned mare with the knotted hindquarters, who complained of the cold and of the stallion's breath, and below her again was the lowest figure, the one only half finished, drawn in dots where its legs should have been.

That last one, the dotted beast, had no legs to speak of and no voice at all. When the water rose and the plates ground together, the others began to climb across each other, scrambling up shoulders and crests, and the stack swayed. The stallion reached the far bank first and turned round to call them, and the mare called back, and the striped one held on. But the dotted beast only lowered its head to the mud and waited. The water came up over its dots, slowly, the way milk rises in a pan, and by the time the ice had gone out to sea there was nothing left on that bank but a little shadow, pale as a thumbprint, and the sound of the river going on without it.