Black and grey blackwork and dotwork sleeve on an arm, with a mandala-style motif on the upper arm and bands of pattern running down the forearm.

Geometric dotwork sleeve on an arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve, shown on a standing figure from the chest down, features a star-like mandala motif on the upper arm and horizontal bands of geometric pattern on the forearm. The work is built from fine dot stippling and solid black fill, with clean pale gaps where the skin is left untattooed. The figure wears a black tank top and grey jeans against a black background, and the arm is raised toward the camera.

Blackwork Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Forearm Mandala Star Geometric pattern Band Sleeve Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the wind off Scarrow Holm has teeth tonight and I'll not shout the rest. You want to know about Tamsin Greer and the wall. Everyone on the island knows the wall, the dry stone one that runs from the chapel to the old salt pans, but few know what she did to the stones before she set them. She had a point of flint and a tin of soot, and every evening after the boats came in she sat on the seawall and pricked dots into the grey slabs, thousands of them, until the stone looked like frost on a window.

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Her father said it was foolishness. Fill the cracks, he said, and the sea will do the rest. But Tamsin drew a star first, eight points on a circle, then rings of smaller stars inside it, and she would not let him lay a single slab where the pattern had not been agreed. Some nights she went out with a lantern and the sheep stared at her, and in the morning the dots would be a little darker where the spray had reached them.

When the great storm came in the autumn the lighthouse lamp failed, the wall held everywhere except the stretch where the bands ran along the lower courses. Those bare pale gaps she had left between the patterned blocks, on purpose, so the water could drain through rather than push. The men who came after to rebuild it said she had worked the sea into the stone as surely as she had worked the stars.

I still walk that wall at low tide. If you put your palm on the third band from the bottom, you can feel the tiny hollows under your hand, and you can feel where the untouched stone lets the wind through. Her star crowns the top course now, turned to face the mainland, so the boats can find the harbour mouth.