Forearm tattoo of black dotwork stipple fading upward into a solid black band near the wrist, with a thin strip of unmarked skin between the band and the stipple, photographed with the hand raised.

Dotwork gradient and black band on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a forearm with the hand raised, showing a gradient of fine black dots that grows denser toward the elbow and fades out toward the wrist. Below it sits a solid black band, separated from the dotwork by a thin strip of bare skin. The ink is black only, set against pale skin and a parquet floor, with a plain ring visible on one finger.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Dot Gradient Band Stipple

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

Now sit closer, and mind the fire, because the good part comes after the dark. My grandfather walked the Tarrow flats for forty winters, and he always said the starlings knew the weather before the glass did. Every dusk they rose off the reed beds in their thousands, wheeling over the sluice like smoke thrown up from a bonfire that would not settle.

Keep reading

The year the mill closed, a lad named Ansel Pryce came up from Hull with a box of brushes and a ledger full of debts. He wanted the birds drawn, every one he could count, and my grandfather let him sit in the hide for a week. Ansel marked the paper with a pin prick for each starling he saw, so the page went grey at the top and stayed bare at the bottom, as if the flock were thinning out toward the edge of the moor.

On the last night the birds climbed so high they swallowed the church spire, then dropped all at once into the black of the peat where the water lay still. Ansel said nothing. He only pressed the pin into his own forearm, dot by dot, until the flock was the colour of the dusk and the bare strip beneath it was where the light had gone. My grandfather never forgave him the cost of the ink, but he kept that drawing above the hearth until the damp took it.

So when you see a sky that goes dark from the bottom up, don't hurry home. Count the ones that stay.