Black blackwork tattoo of bold abstract shapes and bars on an upper arm, with a black and white design panel beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black abstract tattoo on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows a bold black tattoo of angular abstract shapes, bars and interlocking forms across the arm, set against a red background. The right panel shows the same design as a black and white drawing on a plain white background. The linework is heavy and solid, with mostly flat black fill and little visible shading.

Blackwork Upper arm Abstract Tribal Bar 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

Sit nearer, where the lamp reaches. No, bring your cup with you, the wind off the breakwater gets into old men's bones and I'll not talk to a shivering back. Right. You want the story of the gate, the one they still argue over in the Fisherman's Rest. You'll get it straight, not the version the landlord tells with his thumbs hooked in his braces.

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Skerrow harbour had a sea gate in those days, a grid of black iron bars that the harbourmaster let down across the mouth when the swell came rolling in. Every dusk Nell Pardoe climbed the gate-house stair and counted the bars against the chalk tally on the wall, one stroke for each. Forty-one bars, forty-one strokes. She had done it every evening for nineteen years and never once got a different number, which is why the town trusted her more than the tide tables.

The night the herring fleet was still out, her count came up thirty-nine. Two bars had slid from the grid into the dark where the chain ran slack. She stood with the chalk in her fist and the sea knocking below, and she had to choose between raising the gate and trusting her own marks. She had never once doubted those marks. So she left the gate down.

At first light they found the two bars on the quay, bent and dumped beside a coil of rope, where a boy had pried them loose for scrap. The boats had come in over the reef in the dark, every one of them, and nobody drowned. Nell's chalk is still on the wall, forty-one strokes and two that she never rubbed out. Every dusk she still counts the bars, then wipes away one stroke and says the number aloud to the water, just to be sure the sea is listening.