Two panels of abstract geometric tattoos: a stippled face with orange and blue accents on a forearm, and a tree, bird, hand and sun on a back.

Abstract face on forearm and tree on back

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a forearm with an abstract face built from overlapping rectangles, outlined in fine black linework with stippled shading. Orange and blue accents sit beside the face and in the lower triangles. The right panel shows a back with a bare tree, a bird, a hand and a sun, with dotted lines and grey shading across the composition.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Back Face Tree Bird Hand Sun Triangle Geometric shape

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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

The pear tree in Widow Abernathy's garden had not leafed in nine winters, but she would not have it cut. Her husband planted it the week they married and said a bare tree was only a tree that was waiting. So the neighbours left it be, and watched the evening sun slide down behind its branches like a coin into a well.

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One spring a tinker's boy called Ned Cotter came over the wall with a spool of waxed linen and a bird he had whittled from elm. Its wings were painted the grey of wet slate and its breast was green as a bottle. He told her a thing held loosely comes home, and that she should hold the string, not the bird. She tied one end to the bare fork of the pear and gave him the other, and he walked it out across the lawn until the line ran taut as a plumb, knotted every arm's length.

On the ninth evening the bird lifted off the string as if it had been waiting all winter for leave. It flew over the wall, over the chapel roof and the triangle of hills beyond, and the thread went after it, hissing through the grass. The widow sat with her hand open on the lawn while the sun went down a second time, orange through the branches, and nothing answered her but the rooks.

At first light she found the thread coiled at the foot of the tree, cool and dry, and the bird perched on the highest twig as though it had never left. Ned was gone, and the wall was still standing. Within a week the pear was in small green leaf, the bark dark where the rain had soaked it, and each time she passed beneath it she felt a tug at her wrist, light and certain, as if something on the far end of the line had decided to stay.