Three views of a colourful dotwork sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, showing animal figures, concentric circles and red dot patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dot-patterned full arm sleeve with animal figures

Dotwork · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The sleeve covers the upper arm and shoulder with stylised animal figures, concentric circles and a dense field of red and yellow dots. Bold black outlines separate the motifs, and fine hatched lines fill some of the shapes. Three photographs from front, side and back show the full wrap-around composition, with colour ink dominating the design.

Dotwork Upper arm Shoulder Concentric circle Dot Sleeve Lizard Line

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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 lizard had taken the wall behind the bakery the way other people take a pew, the same stretch of warm brick every afternoon, and the post office clerk swore it kept better time than the church. Ruth brought it crusts out of habit and never once saw it eat them. She talked to it instead, about the dry spell, the price of flour, and the boy from the council who had measured the riverbank twice and gone away without saying why.

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On the Thursday the river stopped altogether, and people began walking out to the bend in the afternoons to stare at the mud as if it might change its mind. Ruth went too. Along the cracked margin the ground was printed with small round holes, hundreds of them, each ringed by a faint crust of older prints, like the rings of a tree laid flat. She crouched and counted until the sun slid off her shoulders, and in the middle of the bank she found a hollow the size of a dinner plate, where something had dug down and then, for reasons of its own, filled the hole back in.

She went home and did not sleep much. In the morning she took the flour tin from the shelf, tipped it onto the back step and began pressing her thumb into the grey dust, a ring here, a dot there, slowly drawing the bend of the river on the flagstones. By noon the lizard had come down off its wall to sit at the edge of her work, head tilted, watching the pattern grow. When the first hard rain came over the hills that night, it washed the step clean. Ruth said nothing about it to anyone, but the next afternoon she found the lizard back on the warm brick, and she left it a crust anyway.