Forearm with a teal and black tribal spiral tattoo, with silver chain and shell-inlay bangles worn on the wrist.

Blue tribal spiral tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm shows a large tattoo of black-outlined tribal scroll and koru-style spirals, with the open areas filled in teal, blue and green shading that resembles shell inlay. The linework is bold and even, and the shading is smooth and layered, running from the elbow area down to the wrist. The skin is photographed against a sandy, neutral background, with two silver bangles and a shell-inlay bangle worn on the wrist.

Forearm Spiral Tribal pattern Scroll Bangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shell arrived wrapped in a wet tea towel that smelled of diesel, and Hana unwrapped it on the bench as though it might bite. Thirty-one years she had cut paua for the stall at the top of the wharf, and she still held every piece to the window before she trusted it. This one ran from bottle green into a bruised violet, the colour the summer visitors paid extra for and the old fishermen pretended not to notice.

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Her grandson Tom leaned on the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. He wanted a spiral like the one on her wall, the one she'd drawn with a compass and a pencil worn down to a nub. "Every curl has to lead into the next one," she told him, tapping the paper. "If you can see where it stops, you've done it wrong." He nodded the way boys nod when they have stopped listening, and she kept talking anyway, because the saw made a noise that filled the quiet.

By the Friday the bangle was finished, a band of inlay cut so the scrolls ran unbroken around the curve, the pale edge of each line meeting the next without a seam. Tom came in off the ferry with his sister's trunk on a hire trolley and stood at the counter, unsure what to say. Hana put the bangle in his palm and folded his fingers over it. "Give that to whoever you're going back for," she said, "and tell them it doesn't finish."