Three-panel photo of a man's shoulder, chest and upper arm with a bold black blackwork geometric tattoo of triangles, spikes and chevrons, with a zigzag line continuing down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork geometric shoulder and arm piece

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder, upper chest and upper arm, with solid black triangles, chevrons and long tapering spikes arranged in a symmetrical, tribal-inspired pattern. A thin outlined zigzag band runs down the forearm, contrasting with the heavy solid black fills above. The photo is sepia-toned and shows the design from three angles, with the head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Chest Forearm Triangle Chevron Spike Geometric pattern Tribal pattern

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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 down, the lift's broken again, so you'll have to take the stairs like the rest of us. Fourteen floors up, past the wall where somebody painted a heron, and there's Mrs Okonedo's flat with the blinds always half down. I'll tell you about the summer they put the aerials on the roof. Nobody asked us. Men in orange vests came up with cranes and fixed a forest of steel spikes along the parapet, long and thin as knitting needles, and the whole estate started humming at night.

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Old Tomasz from block C said the spikes were pointing at something. He'd been a surveyor before the factory closed, so he believed in angles. He drew us a diagram on the back of a Co-op receipt: triangles stacked like teeth, chevrons pointing down the stairwell, and a zigzag he said was the line the rain took when it came in sideways off the motorway. "Everything here is a warning or a welcome," he said, "depends which way you're facing."

So we went up to the roof on a Sunday with a flask of tea and a torch, and we turned every spike to face the river. That's the trick nobody tells you. The hum stopped. Below us the bridge lights came on one by one, sharp as black ink on a page, and Tomasz laughed until he coughed.

Seven years on, the block's gone, all but the stairwell and the spikes, which the council forgot to take down. Some nights I still climb up and check they're pointing the right way. They are. Mostly.