Full arm sleeve in a Japanese-influenced brushstroke style, with a black enso-style circle and red ring on the upper arm and black strokes running down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Brushstroke circle sleeve on upper arm

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A man in a black tank top shows a full arm sleeve. A solid black circle sits on the upper arm, encircled by a loose red brushstroke ring, with bold black and white brush strokes sweeping down toward the forearm. The background of the sleeve has a grey cracked, mosaic-like texture, and a small patch of red and pink floral detail appears near the wrist.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Circle Brushstroke Abstract Crack Flower

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 old potter at Gull Cove said the moon could be trapped in a bowl if you painted it fast enough. Maren, who swept the kiln floor for her uncle, had heard this every winter and never believed it. The year the fishing failed, the men came asking for something to hang over the harbour wall, and her uncle sent her to fetch the black ink from the chest under the stairs.

Keep reading

The ink was old and thick as tar. He dipped a brush of goat hair and drew one stroke, then another, round and round, never lifting until the circle closed. Then he took the red clay and let it run loose around the black, a ring that wandered like a current. Maren watched the sea outside the shutters go grey, then white at the edges, then quiet.

When the glaze cracked in the firing, a web of fine lines spread over the bowl like dried mud on a riverbed. Her uncle laughed and said the crack was the sea finding its way out. He set the bowl on the sill facing the water, and that night the fishermen's lamps came back one by one through the fog, each boat finding its line home.

In spring Maren found a single pink blossom pressed into the clay at the base, where the glaze had pooled. Nobody had put it there. She kept it in the bowl and never said which of them had made it. On foggy nights the boats still come in by that sill, and the cracks in the glaze catch the lamplight like a road drawn in ash.