A person in a cream fedora and dark t-shirt with a dark tattoo covering the upper arm, shown in a black and grey sleeve design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark tattoo sleeve on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full-length photograph of a person mid-stride against a whitewashed wooden fence, with their face hidden by a cream fedora and long blonde hair. A dense dark tattoo covers the upper arm, shown in black and grey ink, though its individual motifs are hard to make out at this size. The outfit of a dark t-shirt, dark skinny jeans, a gold chain belt and black lace-up boots adds to the composition.

Upper arm Tattoo Sleeve Boot Chain Jeans

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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

The ferry stopped running after the October gale, so Mags Pellow and I walked the coast road to the breakwater with a sack of bait ice and a wind-up gramophone we had no business carrying. Nobody in Crane Harbour would have called it a romantic walk. The tide was out, the boats sat on their keels in the mud like tired cows, and every gull on the quay seemed to be waiting for us to drop something.

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Eddie had come back from the rigs in March with his whole left arm gone dark, wrist to shoulder, done by a man in a caravan outside Lowmouth who would not give his name. Eddie said it was a chart of the Ardmore Deep, every sounding he had taken in six years, buried under so much grey shadow that you could only read the depths if you stood close enough to smell the ink. He kept his jacket on at the Mermaid. Nobody asked him to take it off.

We found him at the end of the wall, where the green light blinks over nothing but water. He had his sleeve pushed up and was tapping the forearm with one finger, the way you might tap a barometer. In the low sun I saw that the shadows were not shadows. They were a single small boat, drawn again and again, each time a little lower in the water than the last.

Mags asked him what the sea would make of that. Eddie looked at the boats sitting in the mud, then at the lighthouse, then at his own arm. He said the sea had never needed a tattoo to know where he'd been, and he let the cuff fall back over the boat.