Project Description

Shark henna tattoo for boys and girls, women and men - showing a simple but well-executed realistic shark centerpiece and abstract swirly water wave designs in a 90s "tribal" style going up the wrist and down the fingerShark Henna Design

I created this great white shark henna tattoo design for my booth neighbor at the Plymouth, MA Pride festival in 2025. The henna shark is copied directly from the logo of her work team, and the spikey 90s “tribal” waves with little spikey shark fin type bits coming off of them are my addition. This is probably the shark henna design that I am the happiest with, out of all the various ones I have tried.

Why did it come out so awesome? I think it just might have to be the following.

1. The shark is pretty realistic – but not TOO realistic.

I was working from an image provided by my client of her company’s Shark Week teambuilding activities logo. It had some neat stylization elements within it to enable it to be rendered simply in just a few colors. The highlights on this great white henna shark’s pectoral fin closest to us, the one farther away, and the top caudal fin are small but important. The little bit of space above and below the closer pectoral fin also help keep it visually distinguishable from the shark’s body.

2. The face has JUST enough features fora cool shark henna design.

The number of teeth is the goldilocks amount – not too little, not too much. It’s scary ‘cuz they’re pointy, but also a little bit cute because there aren’t enough of them. The shark’s eye is just barely visible – I drew a tiny open circle and then put a teeeeny weeny dot in the center of it because too much contrast looked awful. The one thing I added to the face that wasn’t in the image I was looking at was the nose holes. I’ve been told by my marine archaeologist husband who dives in shark-infested waters often that if a great white is WAY too closely menacing you and things are for sure NOT friendly anymore, one of the most effective things you can do to make it go away is to boop it on the nose. Due in large part to this, I’ve paid extra close attention to shark noses. And while I didn’t know for sure what great white nostrils looked like, I knew they had them, and that if I added them, it would read as more face-like to my fellow humans.

3. That dorsal fin – it’s weirdly shaded.

Leaving the dorsal fin light looked terrible – I tried, because in the original shark logo it was very light grey. Coloring it in surely wasn’t going to make it distinguishable. Leaving a space between it and the body didn’t feel right. Shading the whole thing felt too messy. So this is what I decided on – shading medium-lightly in a triangle shape within my little henna shark friend’s fin and leaving a white space along the outer and inner edges of it to make sure it still popped.

4. Check out the gills on that henna shark!

The gills were drawn SUPER cool in the logo, so I emphasized and expanded upon that. They were giving 90s “tribal” tattoo, and I knew I could make them give that even harder, so I did.

5. I had a lot of fun with adding some supporting elements to make it into a fuller, eeeever so slightly more traditional festival henna design.

I knew this shark needed to live in some water, and let’s be real – two of my main go-to tricks that I rely on again and again and again are SWIRLS and DESIGNS THAT GO UP JUST ONE FINGER. There’s something really satisfying about both of those things for me. Also, doing sort of almost kinda symmetrical designs that really aren’t is another one of my favorite things, as is a layout that goes up the middle finger in particular.

6. The ocean water swirls have fins on them!

I’m not even sure I did that on purpose! My brain just works in mysterious and surprising ways, coming up with stuff I didn’t even know I was going to do. Although once I did notice, I was sure to keep going with it, and also to make sure that where I couldn’t do quite a fin, I could more closely echo the gills on the shark’s body. Having the vibe of the water swirls match the gills in this shark henna design really brought the whole thing together.

tldr; I had a lot of fun creating this shark henna design, and it allowed me to combine some visual art history, some careful realistic rendering that focused on some deeply personal concern with shark noses and how boopable they are, and my go-to henna techniques.

If you like this henna design, you just might like the rest of the dude-friendly designs in my festival henna design ebook MENNA – VOLUME 2 – BRANCHING OUT.

 

Want to read the obsessive, wordy, rambling description of just how I did another henna design? I’ve just started up a new category for posts like this one. It’s called Heather Over-Explains It All.* For now it’s just got that one henna elephant everyone loves so much and has been copied so many times by so many other henna and tattoo artists (and others looking for henna elephant inspiration) that people don’t even believe me when I tell them I’m the original artist who came up with it.

 

 

 

*  shoot me a DM on insta or facebook or whatever social media platform has taken over our lives by the time you read this post to explain to ME where that reference comes from, remind me that I promised to give you a digital cookie – a good one though – if you got it, and I will do so.