Solid black abstract tribal design of interlocking curved shapes with pointed tips, drawn as a flash design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tribal interlocking design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black design made of interlocking curved and angular shapes, with long pointed tips extending outward at the corners. The linework is solid fill with no shading, and the negative space between the shapes forms a smaller inner loop at the centre. The image is a clean, high-contrast graphic on a plain white background.

Abstract Loop

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

Sit yourself down on the locker, and mind the hook, it has bitten better men than you. No, leave the kettle, I want the steam for this. Forty winters I stood at this range on the Marigold, and the first thing I learned was that a lid will go walkabout in a swell unless something holds it. Hold it with a grommet and a cord and it comes home. Hold it with nothing and you are scraping mutton off the deckhead.

Keep reading

The clasp that did the holding came from old Amos Trewin, the bosun, who whittled it from an offcut of lignum on a wet afternoon off Cape Wrath. Four curved arms, shaped like the flare of a bow, each one crossing its neighbour and tucking under, so you could not pull one free without the whole thing sliding. He gave a point to every corner, sharp as a gaff hook, so it would bite the iron and stay put. In the middle he left a small eye, no bigger than a thumbnail, and that was where the cord went through.

The winter the Marigold ran down the coast in a sou'wester, nobody thought the lid would hold. The pot went over twice. I had the clasp in my fist and my knuckles were white as bone, and that little eye kept the cord true when everything else in that galley wanted to fly. Amos had gone over the side off the Dogger by then, and I never once told him the clasp saved my supper.

So there it hangs, on the nail above the range, black and patient, the points gone smooth from my thumb. When you go up on deck, take the lid with you, and tell them the cook said mind the corners.