Two crossed forearms covered in black blackwork tattoos of lattices, diamonds, dots and spirals, with stylised motifs on the upper arm, against a dark background.

Blackwork geometric sleeve on crossed arms

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Both arms are crossed in front of a dark patterned shawl, and the skin is covered in bold black linework. The design combines lattice and diamond grids, rows of dots, spirals and stylised figurative motifs, with fine hatched borders. The tattoos are rendered in solid black ink with no shading or colour, and the dark, low-key lighting keeps the background almost black.

Blackwork Geometric Dotwork Forearm Upper arm Lattice Diamond Dot Spiral Geometric pattern Sleeve Linework

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

The net-mender at Skarra Haven kept her mother's pattern book in the lamp locker, wrapped in oilcloth against the damp. Every spring the boats went out with fresh twine, and every spring the women of the village knotted the same diamonds into the mesh, row over row, so that the herring would see a lattice and think it was a way out and swim into it. Ingrid Vold had learned the diamonds at seven. She learned the dots at nine, the little rows that counted the fathoms, and the spirals at twelve, which were for turning a boat back when the wind had its own mind.

Keep reading

The year the Sorrel did not come home, she unrolled the book on the drying frame and found a page she had never been shown. It was a long crossing of lines, a deer's head worked into the corner, its antlers made of hooks, and beneath it a single instruction in her grandmother's hand: bind the sleeve before the spring tide, or the sea keeps the last one. Ingrid had no idea what a sleeve was in the sense her grandmother meant, until the widow Marit came to the shed with her good wool coat over one arm and asked, quietly, whether there was room on the frame for her husband's shirt.

They worked through the night by the stove. Ingrid inked the lines onto the cloth with the soot-black dye they used for the dark nets, and Marit pricked the dots with a bone awl, and neither of them spoke of the boat. At dawn the cloth was bound at the wrists and folded like a pair of crossed arms, and when Ingrid laid it on the slip, the tide came up to meet it, stopped, and drew back without a sound.

The Sorrel came in at noon, low in the water and singing. Ingrid never learned what had been done with the shirt. She only kept the book, and the next spring she started the page again.