A black geometric armband tattoo with zigzag borders and chevron patterns wraps the forearm near the elbow, with a coloured feather tattoo partly visible on the thigh below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black geometric armband and feather tattoo

Blackwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black band with zigzag edges and an inner panel of interlocking chevron and angular shapes encircles the upper forearm of a person with arms folded. Linework is bold and fully filled in black with no visible grey shading. At the bottom left, part of a thigh tattoo shows a feather in red and grey with fine dark linework and a small curled scroll, and the background is plain and neutral.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Thigh Armband Zigzag Chevron Geometric pattern Feather Scroll

Find an artist for this

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 cook on the herring boat Sweet Agnes had one rule about the galley fire: it was lit before the men woke and not a minute after. Mags Tully kept her pattern in the soot above the stove, a band of lines drawn with a burnt stick, zigzag at the edges like the teeth of a saw, and inside it a row of chevrons that always pointed toward the bow. Every dawn she traced it with one finger before she touched the kettle. The men thought it was for luck. It was for counting.

Keep reading

The winter the Agnes went north past the Skerries, the skipper, a man called Dunnet who trusted only his own eyes, stopped listening when she said the swell was lengthening. He laughed at the soot. He said a woman who drew on walls had no business on the bridge. Mags said nothing. She put a gull's feather in the bread tin, the way her grandmother had, and went on with the porridge.

Three days later the middle chevron had smudged, though nobody had been near it. She stood with the ladle dripping and counted the teeth of the zigzag, one, two, nine, and understood the sea would turn on the ninth wave. She beat the pan on the rail. Dunnet came down cursing and was halfway through his shout when the deck tilted and the whole boat groaned, and he sat down hard on the bench without a word.

They turned for home that night with the feather still in the tin. Mags never explained the wall to anyone, and in the spring the men scrubbed it clean for a new coat of whitewash. She drew it again the next morning, exactly as it had been, starting with the teeth.