Close view of black horizontal bands tattooed across a person's forearm, with a striped shirt sleeve rolled up above the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black horizontal bands on forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a person with their arms folded in front of a striped shirt, with the forearm in focus. The forearm carries several dark, solid horizontal bands of black ink that wrap around the arm. The image is in black and grey, with a wristwatch visible on the other wrist against the soft, neutral background.

Blackwork Forearm Stripe Band

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

On Skerrin the fishing wives marked their husbands' absences with a black band inked round the forearm, one for each winter the boat came home short. It was not mourning but a count kept honest. Ruth Abernethy had three bands on her left arm when the Margaret went out in a squall and did not come back, and she inked nothing for a week, because the island said a woman should not mark a man before the sea had finished with him.

Keep reading

On the eighth day the tide brought in a sea chest with a brass watch still ticking inside. Her son's name was scratched on the lid, and beneath it a row of stripes like a lighthouse seen from the water. Ruth took the watch to the minister, who said it could belong to anyone. She took it home anyway and wound it every morning.

Through the spring she wound it, and each morning she checked the ticks against the sea's own rhythm, which her mother had taught her to hear in the shingle. The watch lost a minute a month. She never corrected it. She said the sea would forgive a little drift, but it would not forgive a woman who stopped listening.

At midsummer she went to the fish-merchant's boy and asked for black ink. He worked the bands slowly, one for every week she had waited, and when he finished she held her arm up to the window. The lines ran clean from wrist to elbow. "Now the count is honest," she said, and went down to the harbour with the watch in her pocket to see who the tide would bring.