Blackwork geometric sleeve covering an arm, with solid black rectangular panels, fine white-skin lines and a diamond pattern band around the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black geometric sleeve on an arm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows an arm with a full geometric sleeve made of solid black panels outlined by thin lines of untattooed skin. A band of diamond and lozenge motifs sits near the elbow, breaking up the larger rectangular shapes. The ink is entirely black and the plain white background keeps the focus on the pattern.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Upper arm Geometric pattern Rectangle Diamond Line Sleeve

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

Old Maddox had walled the orchard in black slate, one square for every tree he meant to keep, and the rest he gave to the rooks. When his granddaughter Ella came up the lane in August with a basket on her hip, the apples were already splitting on the branches and the wasps had found the windfalls under the Bramley.

Keep reading

"You'll not count them all," he said, not looking up from the stone he was dressing. "Nobody counts the trees. You count the gaps between."

She did not believe him, so she walked the lines of stone, row after row, and the squares lay dark in the shade. In the corner where the diamond stones were set in a band, the lichen had grown in the shape of the lozenges, and she counted those instead, because counting was easier than listening to him.

On the last evening he took her to the gate and showed her the crossways, where four plots met at a little cross of pale mortar. "Every plot touches three others," he said. "Pull one stone out and the whole orchard leans." She thought he was talking about walls. He was talking about the family, though she was too young then to hear it.

The next summer the rooks came down in their hundreds and the gate hung open on one hinge. Ella walked the lines with a sack of slate and a bucket of mortar, filling each gap where a stone had gone, until the squares stood whole again and the windfalls lay where they had always lain, inside the walls.