Black tribal swirl tattoo with dots and sweeping spikes on the inner forearm, shown in blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black tribal swirl on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design sweeps across the forearm, built from curling swirls, sharp tapering spikes and a line of small dots. The linework is solid and even, with the ink appearing dense and uniform rather than shaded. The design is set on a diagonal across the arm against a plain background, with a red sleeve visible at the top left.

Blackwork Forearm Tribal Swirl Dot Spike Abstract

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the fire will not carry my voice to the back of the barn and I am too old to shout. You want the tale of the wind that lived in Hollin Wood. Everyone's grandmother knows it, but none of them tell it right, so listen.

Keep reading

The wind had no shape of its own, only the trees it combed and the bracken it flattened. One November a charcoal burner's boy called Ewan Pell went up past the last stile to fetch back his father's goat, and he found the wind caught in a bramble thicket, tangled like a fleece on a fence. It was coiling round itself, spitting out little seeds of dark rain, and its long thin fingers had hooked into the holly. "Let me go," it said, "and I will give you the way home." Ewan, who was foolish in the way of boys, unpicked the last briar with his teeth.

The wind went spinning down the valley in curls and spikes, scattering dots of seed behind it like crows' eyes. It did not take him home. It took him to the mill race, where the water ran black and the reeds bowed all one way, and there it showed him a path that circled back on itself, every turn the same as the last. He walked it three days. On the third, he understood the wind had been teaching him to read its shape, and that a path which curls like that only ends where you choose to stop walking.

So he stopped. He sat down on a root, and the goat, which had been waiting patiently all along, bleated once and the wind lay down beside them both. Ewan walked home by the old stile. Mind the bramble, and never unpick a promise with your teeth, that's the whole of it.