The human hand can detect both the form and texture of the contact surface. The detection of skin displacement (sustained stimulus) and change in skin displacement (transient stimulus) are thought to be mediated in different tactile channels; however, tactile form perception may use both channels to reconstruct an unified tactile imagery of contact surface in the brain. Here, we studied whether the temporal frequency and temporal coherence information of tactile stimuli encoded in sensory neurons could be used to recognize the form of the contact surface. We used a known tactile phenomenon, the fishbone tactile illusion (FTI), as a probe for tactile perception in humans. It uses an archetypal surface geometry that has a smooth central bar and textures (ridges and grooves) in its adjacent areas. By stroking the central bar back and forth with a fingertip, an observer typically perceives an indented surface geometry even though the bar is physically flat. We used a passive high-density pin matrix to extract only the vertical information of the contact surface, while excluding any tangential force caused by rubbing the surface. Participants in the psychological experiment reported the indented surface geometry by tracing the FTI textures with pin matrices of different spatial densities (1.0- and 2.0- mm pin intervals). Participants reported a steep decrease in the relative magnitude of the indented surface geometry when pins in the adjacent areas vibrated synchronously. To investigate possible mechanisms for tactile perception in the FTI, we developed a computational model of sensory neurons to estimate temporal patterns of action potentials from tactile receptive fields. Our computational data suggest that i) the temporal asynchrony of sensory neuron responses correlated with the relative magnitude of indented geometric perception, and ii) the temporal change of displacements in tactile stimuli correlated with the asynchrony of simulated sensory neuron responses for the fishbone surface patterns. Based on these results, we suggest that both the temporal frequency and asynchrony of activity in sensory neurons could produce tactile form perception.