Black tribal-style shark design on a white background, with bold swirling linework and geometric triangles across its body and fins.

Tribal shark design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black shark drawn in a bold tribal pattern, shown swimming diagonally upward with its head at the top left. The body is filled with swirling curves, rounded cut-outs and small triangular patterns that form the markings along the head, fins and tail. The image is pure black ink on white with no shading or colour, and the design is centred with generous margins.

Shark Fish Tribal pattern Swirl Triangle

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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

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only just boiled and Mrs Pringle will have my hide if the tea goes cold on the second floor. You want the shark? Everybody wants the shark. Right. Summer of 'thirty-one, the Bellevue on Marrow Head, when the front parlour still had its brass rail and the landlady kept her ledger with a stub of pencil tied on string.

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The shark came in on the evening tide, a long dark thing with its back cut into curls, as if the sea had been stirring itself with a spoon. It swam right under the pier and went round the pilings, slow as a clock hand, reading the names carved into the wood. Young Tobias Nell, who sold whelks off a tray, swore blind it had a pattern on its flank, bent triangles and rounded holes, and that one of those holes looked straight up at him and winked.

Albert Pringle, the landlady's brother, had a debt with the harbourmaster and a notion about the reward pinned outside the chandler's. He rowed out at dawn with a coil of rope and a bottle of rum for courage. He came back two hours later with wet sleeves and no rope, and he would only say the shark had been very civil about it, and had asked him politely to leave his boots on the slipway.

Every October since, the damp on the cellar wall has grown into a curl just like that back, and the ledger still lists one lodger, Albert, paid up to the end of the month and gone swimming. Mind the third stair going down, it creaks. Go on, look out the window. If the water's quiet you'll see the pier, and if it's not, you'll see a fin going round the pilings, reading.