Three pencil sketches of a badger inside a shield-shaped crest, shown side by side on a white background, with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three badger crest designs in pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

Three graphite pencil sketches show a badger sitting or lying within a shield-shaped crest, each with a different pose and crest outline. The linework is fine and sketchy, with soft grey shading on the fur, the crest edges and the ground beneath the animals. The drawings are arranged left to right on a plain white background.

Crest Shield Sketch Design

Find an artist for this

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

Ada had drawn the badger four times before the mason would accept it, and the fourth was the one he carved. "Too pleased with itself," Mr Pryce said, tapping the sketch with his chisel handle. "A badger doesn't sit like a bishop. It sits like it's been asked to leave." So she went out past the kiln sheds at dawn with a pencil and a flask of cold tea, and watched the sett under the hawthorns where the old brock lived with his sows and his ill-tempered grandsons.

Keep reading

He came out backwards, dragging bedding in his jaws, and she sketched him in the grey light: the hunched shoulders, the white band slipping up over his eyes, the way he paused on the lip of the earth as if reading the weather. Every morning she drew him again. In the shield on the lintel of the new town hall, he would lie low on the grass with one paw folded, unbothered by the crowds that gathered to watch the flags go up.

By October the crest was finished, and the council wanted a second, smaller one for the almshouse door. Ada made the badger stand up that time, one forepaw raised, and Mr Pryce grunted approval. The night before she was due to deliver it, she walked back out to the hawthorns with a lantern. The sett was empty, the earth fresh-turned and dark, and the only trace of him she could find was a single white stripe of hair snagged on the wire fence, catching the lamplight like a signature.