Black and white drawing of a long S-curved shape filled with paisley and tribal ornament, shown on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Elongated paisley and tribal ornament design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A long, S-curved shape is filled edge to edge with paisley-like swirls, scrolls, dots and striped bands. The linework is solid black with white negative space, and the shading relies on contrast rather than grey tones. The shape sits centred on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Blackwork Paisley Tribal pattern Swirl Ornament Scroll Dot

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

Ashgar had carved horns for the Tellow valley for thirty winters, and he knew the difference between a horn that would call the sheep home and one that would only scatter them. The good ones came from the bull kept on the high pasture. This one he had been asked to make from a ram's horn the wind had cracked along its curl, and the widow who brought it wanted nothing plain on it.

Keep reading

So he worked through the cold months with a bone awl and a little pot of soot, pricking out swirls the way his mother had shown him, teardrops folding into teardrops, each one holding the seed of the next. Dots went in rows like stitched buttons. Bands of stripes ran down the outer bend, so that a man looking up from the path would see a river of pattern and not a bone at all. When he finished, the horn was black and white like a night with the moon behind cloud.

On the first warm evening he carried it up to the ridge and blew. The sound rolled down into the valley and came back twice off the far scree, and the sheep, strung out across three fields, lifted their heads and turned as one and walked toward it. The widow stood at the gate counting them through. Her son, who had been gone to the coast for a year, came up the road behind the flock, following the note the way a lamb follows its mother's bell.