Sheet of eight black tribal-style gecko and lizard designs with white pattern details, shown as flash for tattoo use.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal gecko flash sheet

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a sheet of eight gecko and lizard designs in various poses, some curled, some splayed, drawn as solid black silhouettes. White linework and patterns such as spirals, diamonds, chevrons and dots decorate the bodies and tails. The designs are arranged in a loose grid on a plain white background, with no shading and no colour.

Blackwork Lizard Tribal pattern Spiral Reptile

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

Hush now, and mind the windfalls, for the geckos are out. Abel Reddy's orchard ran down to the brook behind Hollins Farm, and every August the plum trees bent so low their branches brushed the grass. That was the summer the lizards came up out of the stone wall, pale-spotted on the warm bricks, and Abel said the sun had painted them and they would walk off the wall if you listened hard enough.

Keep reading

Young Tomas Reddy did not believe him. He was nine and sure of everything, and he carried a tin of chalk in his pocket to mark the ones he counted. He drew a spiral on the first gecko he caught, a little fellow with a tail coiled like a watch spring, and let it go. Next morning that spiral was on the trunk of the oldest plum, drawn in white sap, and a second one curled beside it. Nobody had climbed that tree.

Abel did not look surprised. He took the boy to the wall and showed him where the marks went round and round, each turn tied to a wind, a frost, a flood that had come in some year long past. "They keep the count," he said, "and they only tell it to those who sit still long enough to hear it." Tomas sat still all afternoon, until the sun went low and the stone was warm under his legs.

Tomas went home that evening with chalk on his palms and a gecko asleep under his collar. The spiral he drew is still on that plum trunk, grey now and split with age, and every August, when the fruit drops, I go down and trace the turns with my finger and count them, one for every year the lizards have kept faith with us.