Bold black abstract tribal-style tattoo on the inner forearm, with blue and purple watercolour-style shading.

Black tribal symbol with blue and purple wash on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A bold black abstract symbol with sweeping, brush-like black linework sits on the inner forearm, with curved tips extending outward. Blue shading fills the upper section and purple and pink shading fills the lower section, with soft edges that blend into the skin. The tattoo is centred on a plain, lightly lit forearm against a dark background.

Forearm

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

Pass me the lamp, Ada, and mind the third stair, it has never forgiven anyone. Right. Where was I? Ah, the Hinge. You won't find it on any chart the Admiralty sold you, because the men who drew those charts never rowed out to it in fog. Two tides meet off Scarrow Holm, one cold and blue from the north, one bruised purple from the trench beyond the skerries, and where they quarrel they throw up a black rock with arms like a gull's wings. Sailors call it the Hinge. My grandfather called it the Stubborn Door.

Keep reading

In the winter of the great frost, a girl named Isla Peat rowed out alone with a sack of seed potatoes and a cracked bell she meant to hang on the rock as a warning. The sea lay flat as glass at dawn, and then it wasn't. The blue current caught her bow and the purple one took her stern, and the boat spun like a dog chasing its own tail. She shouted at the water. Nothing answered except the bell, ringing softly every time the boat tipped.

She could have fought it. Instead she shipped the oars, sat down on the thwart and let the two currents argue without her. Hours passed. The rock rose out of the spray, black and patient, and the colours slid past each other until she could see the purple turning blue at its edges and the blue flushing pink where it touched the warmth. When the tide finally slackened, the boat drifted into the lee of the Hinge and bumped against it like a calf nudging its mother.

She came home with the potatoes soaked and the bell still ringing. Nobody believed her, so she painted what she had seen on the wall of the old chapel, and the parish priest, who had no imagination, scraped it off. The sea remembered anyway. Ask any boatman on Scarrow and he'll show you the same thing: two colours, one black gate, and a place where the water stops arguing long enough to let you through.