Black geometric armband tattoo with bands of zigzag and interlocking lines wrapped around a person's upper arm, with a red and grey feather tattoo partly visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric armband tattoo on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A solid black armband tattoo wraps around the upper arm, made of parallel bands with a zigzag edge, a stepped border and a dense interlocking geometric pattern. The linework is bold and the black ink is solid, with no visible shading. A smaller tattoo of a feather in red and grey sits lower in the frame on the leg, and the arms are folded across the body against a neutral background.

Geometric Blackwork Upper arm Thigh Armband Geometric pattern Zigzag Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come down on Wenmouth market since before dawn, and by the time the bell rang for noon Nell Hasket had sold two lengths of braid and a pair of brass buttons. Her canvas sagged in the middle where the water gathered, and every quarter hour she pushed it up with a broom handle and sent the puddle sliding off onto the cobbles.

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Across the aisle a stranger had set up beside the fishmonger three days running. He had a tin box of old cutting tools and a stack of black cloth bands, each stitched with a pattern no one in the town could name. A row of sawtooth points ran along one edge, a stepped border along the other, and between them a lattice of triangles folded back on itself if you looked at it too long. He never once looked up at the sky, and he did not seem to mind the wet at all.

When Nell asked what the pattern was for, he said a band kept its wearer on the path between two rivers. The zigzag was the water and the steps were the stones you crossed on. She laughed and called him a liar. Then on Saturday her nephew Tam, who had gone down to the weir after the floodgates opened, came running up Cutler Lane with no coat and his arm bound in a torn shirt. He had been swept against the weir and climbed out by a route he could not afterwards describe, and round his wrist ran a thin black line that nobody had put there.

Nell went across the aisle at dusk. The stall was bare except for the tin box, and the fishmonger said the man had packed up before the rain eased and taken the road east. She opened the box. Beneath the cutting tools lay one more band, and she tied it round her own wrist before she could think better of it, while the rain kept falling on the empty canvas all night.