Tribal gecko tattoo on skin

Black and grey · Photo

A black gecko with a curled tail is drawn in a tribal style, filled with bold swirls, stripes and dotted patterns across the body and limbs. The image is black and grey, with the tattoo centred on smooth, pale skin. The linework is crisp and the shading is solid, with the tail tapering to a curl at the bottom.

Lizard Tribal pattern Swirl

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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, 14 November, Doncaster. The big top went to a scrap man this morning for forty pounds and his promise not to burn the canvas. Father Lusk held the centre pole himself while the lads unpicked the guy ropes, and when it came down he ran his thumb along the black swirl near its foot. That is the gecko Grandmother Vera cut into the wood with a hot nail the year we crossed the Humber. She said it would keep the damp out. Nobody believed her, but the pole has stood eighty years.

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The lizard was never much of an act, not like the lions. Sol used to sit under the rigging with a plate of mealworms and wait for the little brown ones to come down the ropes, and the audience thought he was a wizard. Mrs Dacre at the Co-op says they will not come to see a show with no animals, and she is probably right. Eleven people paid on Saturday, and two of them were Sol's cousins.

This evening the lorries were loaded and the field was empty except for the pole lying in the mud. Sol came back across the grass with his coat buttoned to the neck and stood over it for a long while. He had a stub of chalk in his pocket, the kind we used for marking the ring, and I thought he might write something on the wood. Instead he only traced the curl at the bottom, slowly, the way you might count stitches.

When the cab door slammed he was still standing there. I could see him from the window, small against the grey, and the pole pointing back the way we had come, its tail curled toward the gate as if it meant to follow us out.