Full arm sleeve tattoo in dotwork and geometric patterns, with black and grey shading on the shoulder and upper arm fading to red and orange dots on the forearm.

Geometric dotwork sleeve with a pale sun

Dotwork · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A full sleeve runs from the shoulder to the wrist, filled with dotwork and geometric patterns. Black and grey shading with wave-like and zigzag textures covers the shoulder and upper arm, with a pale unshaded circle near the top of the shoulder. Red and orange dots and squares fade out towards the wrist, and the bare forearm and hand are visible against a plain pale wall.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Sleeve Sun Dot Geometric pattern Wave Zigzag Abstract

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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

The sixth lamp on the Calder loop had been wrong since Tuesday, flickering in a pattern no fitter could explain. Mr Pryce from the depot swore it was the damp. I told him damp doesn't keep time. For three nights I sat in the box with a pencil and copied the flicker onto squared paper, dot by dot, and by Friday the grid had a shape I didn't like: a wave that rose and broke into zigzags, like the lines the sea makes when a wind gets under it.

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Then the sun came into it. Each evening, when the light went off the goods yard, a pale disc showed on the signal board's glass, a round blankness where the paint had flaked away years ago. Someone had once told me that the old railwaymen cut their own dials from pale tin so the men could find north in fog. I never found out who. I only knew the lamp pattern always stopped at that circle, as if it had been built around it.

On the last night the colours came, the red and orange, first in the signal glass and then in the frosted windows, spreading down the platform in squares that faded as they fell. I stopped copying and watched. The eleven-forty was late, and when it finally pulled in, its lamps threw the grid across the rails in perfect order, every dot where I had drawn it.

I tore up the squared paper and went home. Pryce came in the morning and said the lamp was fine. It was. It has been fine ever since, and I still see it on the ceiling at night, a pale sun and the waves going down into the dark.