  Evidence suggests that both the interaction of so-called Merkel cells and the
epidermal stress distribution play an important role in the formation of
fingerprint patterns during pregnancy. To model the formation of fingerprint
patterns in a biologically meaningful way these patterns have to become
stationary. For the creation of synthetic fingerprints it is also very
desirable that rescaling the model parameters leads to rescaled distances
between the stationary fingerprint ridges. Based on these observations, as well
as the model introduced by K\"ucken and Champod we propose a new model for the
formation of fingerprint patterns during pregnancy. In this anisotropic
interaction model the interaction forces not only depend on the distance vector
between the cells and the model parameters, but additionally on an underlying
tensor field, representing a stress field. This dependence on the tensor field
leads to complex, anisotropic patterns. We study the resulting stationary
patterns both analytically and numerically. In particular, we show that
fingerprint patterns can be modeled as stationary solutions by choosing the
underlying tensor field appropriately.
