Full arm sleeve in blackwork and dotwork featuring hexagons and a central mandala motif, running from the upper arm down to the wrist.

Geometric blackwork sleeve on arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm with a honeycomb of hexagons and dots that gives way to a large central mandala with scrolled and petal-like shapes. Below it, a band of outlined hexagons and geometric rosettes wraps the forearm toward the wrist. The work is rendered entirely in black ink and grey shading, with dense dotwork filling and crisp solid outlines, and the arm is shown against a pale paved street with a bicycle in the background.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Forearm Hexagon Mandala Geometric pattern Sleeve Dot Honeycomb Rosette Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the eleven-forty is never on time and you may as well hear something useful while you wait. My grandfather laid the floor of this station the year the line through the valley was finished. He was a tiler, not a builder, and he would not let another man set a hexagon. Six sides, he said, and not one of them lies to you.

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He had a rule about the dots. Every tile in the concourse had a pinprick pressed into its centre, and he filled each one by hand with a dot of slate-black, so the floor held the light differently at every hour. Men coming off the night train would stop dead at the middle, where the tiles ring out into a great rosette of petals and curling scrolls, and they would say it looked like a wheel of frost. My grandfather said it was a map of where a man could stand and not be lost.

The trouble came in the winter of the strike. A lad from the signal box brought him a drawing copied from a temple roof in a borrowed book and asked for the same rosette to be laid in the waiting room where the coal fires used to be. My grandfather refused. A pattern with no edge, he said, will swallow whoever walks on it. The lad went off angry and laid it himself in the damp of the cellar, out of sight, and by spring nobody could find the stairs back up.

So mind your feet at the middle, and when you reach it, look down and count outwards. Six sides, then six again, toward the edge where the grey stone meets the rails. My grandfather laid every ring of it, and the way out is still there, if you trust the count and not your nerves. Ah, there's the eleven-forty. Up you get.