Solid black tribal swirl tattoo on the upper arm of a person wearing a dark sleeveless top.

Black tribal swirl on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design curls across the upper arm, built from a large open spiral and tapering flame-like bands that sweep down towards the elbow. The ink is solid black with a slight sheen from the skin, with no shading or colour. The design fills the centre of the frame against a plain skin tone and dark fabric background.

Blackwork Upper arm Tribal Swirl Abstract

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pit at Gallow Fold had been shut nine days when the water started climbing the drift on its own, and Mab Corrigan took her grandfather's lamp down the shaft to see why. Nobody had told her to go. The men at the top only shook their heads and said the mountain was taking back what it had lent them, and that a woman should keep to her kitchen.

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At the bottom the old gallery turned round on itself, the way the men said it always had, in one slow coil like a snail's shell. Her grandfather had called it the Coil and chalked a circle beside it so the new lads would know where the roof was soft. The black walls on either side rose in long tapering tongues, and the roof was thick with the soot of a hundred years of fire, but the water came in curling bands along the floor like it was trying to climb toward the light.

She sat down in the coil where the chalk circle was and waited, because her grandfather had always said you did not argue with a mountain, you simply let it finish talking. When the water reached her boots she took from her apron pocket the last lump of coal her husband had cut the week before he died, set it on the rock, and spoke to the dark the way she spoke to a stubborn child. The bands of water slowed, folded back on themselves, and drained away down the coil into nothing.

The pit never reopened, but the lamp still hangs by the back door of the Corrigan house, and on wet mornings the village children say the chalk circle on the lower step is wider than it was. Mab's coal sits on the windowsill where the light falls on it, and no one in Gallow Fold has ever tried to burn it.