Black and white photo of a solid black armband tattoo with a ragged edge on a person's forearm, in Blackwork style, above a hand reaching down.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black armband tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's forearm and hand, with the figure standing on a concrete surface behind. The tattoo is two solid black bands encircling the forearm near the wrist, with a ragged, brushed fringe along the lower band. The shading is flat black ink on skin, and the composition places the forearm diagonally across the frame with the torso and legs in the background.

Blackwork Forearm Armband Band Wrist

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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 lift in Harrow Court had been dead since Candlemas, so the water came up the stairs in buckets, and the boy who carried them was Tomas, though only old Mrs Pell on the eleventh floor ever used his name. Everyone else called him lad. The wind off the estate came up the stairwell like a dog looking for a door, and it liked boys best.

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One grey morning Mrs Pell caught him on the bottom landing, took his wrist in a hand like a root, and wound a length of black cord round it twice. She knotted it hard. Tomas tried to pull free and she said, "That's for the wind. It can't get a grip on a thing that's tied to the ground." He laughed at her, then climbed the stairs anyway, and the wind pulled at his jacket all the way to the top and found nothing to hold.

The cord frayed within a month, as cord does, its loose ends lifting and combing out where the knot had been. Mrs Pell told him not to cut it. Years later, when the lift was finally mended and the flats were emptied for the demolition men, Tomas was carrying the last bucket down the stairs when the wind came up the stairwell and rattled every window in the block. He stopped on the landing and waited for it to pass.

Mrs Pell had been dead nine years by then, so he had the cord copied onto his arm in ink, both bands and the ragged fringe, so the knot would never come loose. The wind still comes up the stairs. It just goes round him.