Black blackwork band tattoo with geometric patterns, dots and wave lines wrapping the upper thigh, with a small heart tattoo on a finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric blackwork band on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A wide band of black ink wraps around the upper thigh, filled with geometric shapes, diamonds, wave-like scrolls and small dots. The linework is bold and solid, with areas of dense black fill contrasting against the bare skin. A small outlined heart sits on a finger of a hand resting on grey fabric in the foreground, and the photo is taken at an angle indoors.

Blackwork Geometric Thigh Hand Band Geometric pattern Diamond Wave Dot Heart Finger

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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

Hold the lamp steady, Danny, or the wave will go crooked and Mrs Tolley will have my hide. There. That's the one. Forty-one feet of border for the new hall at Porthcurnick, and every black tile of it cut by my own hand in the back of the kiln shed, because the glaze in the shops came out grey and dull as porridge.

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Mr Tolley wanted diamonds first, then the scrolls, the way the sea rolls up the slipway when the wind's gone round to the west. I told him a wave should never sit still on a wall. So I laid them in a run that breaks at every third tile, and filled the gaps with dots, one for each man who sailed out of this harbour in the autumn of thirty-one and never came back. Nobody asked me what the dots were for. Nobody needed to.

People think a border is only decoration. It's a fence you can look over. The diamonds keep the eye moving so it doesn't fall into the black, and the black keeps the wave from running off the edge of the room. Fill too much and it chokes; leave too much bare and it looks like a bandage on a wall.

Mind the last course now. Thirty-one tiles left in the box, and I always leave one unfired, a plain black square with nothing on it. Your grandad asked me why once. I told him it was for whoever came to finish the pattern. He thought I was being soft. Maybe I was. Pass me the grout, love, and mind your fingers on the trowel.