Full arm sleeve in blackwork and dotwork with a hexagon scale pattern on the forearm and an ornamental mandala on the upper arm, shown from three angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blackwork sleeve with hexagon scales and mandala

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows one arm covered by a full sleeve tattoo, photographed from three angles side by side. A dense hexagonal scale pattern runs down the forearm, with a lighter outlined mandala-like motif near the elbow and upper arm. Solid black fill and fine dotwork create the shading, and the image is entirely black and grey against the skin tone.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Hexagon Scale Mandala Geometric pattern Sleeve Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and keep your boots off my hearthrug. No, Davey, the coal stays in the scuttle till I say so. Right. You want the snake, you'll have the snake, the way my mam had it from hers.

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Under Hollin Fell there was a seam nobody could work, because every time the picks went in, the roof came down in scales. Black they were, each one as wide as a man's palm and six-sided, fitted edge to edge like the cells in a honeycomb. The old hewers said they were the shed skin of something lying under the hill, and something that size doesn't need to be seen to be felt. Shift after shift, the timber groaned like a beast turning over in its sleep.

Then came Mr Ashworth Pell, with his ledgers and his gunpowder men, and he told the colliery committee the snake was a story for children. He sent six men in with charges. They came up grey and quiet, and two of them didn't come up at all.

Tom Greave went down the next morning alone, with a lamp, a tin of lime and his dead father's pencil. Nobody knows what he drew on that face. The lime rings are still there, pale circles laid one inside another, with a star at the centre like the cut of a lily. Ashworth sent men down a week later and they found the galleries dry, the scales quiet, and Tom sitting on his heels, eating bread.

So the lamp-room lad still licks his thumb before the first shift and touches the nearest ring. Go on, Davey, touch it. The snake's only sleeping, and it likes to be asked.