Man with full black and grey geometric dotwork sleeves, snowflake-style shoulder pieces and a chest design, photographed against a dark background.

Geometric dotwork sleeves and chest on a shirtless man

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man stands with his arms angled forward, showing full sleeves covering both arms and designs across his shoulders and upper chest. The tattoos combine bold blackwork outlines with fine dotwork shading, forming mandala-like rosettes, snowflake motifs, hexagonal grids, circles and stripes. The image is in black and grey against a near-black backdrop, with the composition cropped below the chin and above the waistband of his jeans.

Dotwork Geometric Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Chest Geometric Mandala Snowflake Hexagon Circle Stripe Sleeve Chest piece

Find an artist for this

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 lift at Calder House had been dead since March, so the whole block climbed the stairs with their shopping and their grudges. I was the caretaker, which meant I knew every landing by its smell of bleach and its pattern of cracked lino. On the ninth floor the tiles made a hexagon around a drain, and someone had drawn a snowflake in marker beside the fire door, six arms, each one carefully doubled, the way a draughtsman would do it.

Keep reading

His name was Mr Lusk, flat 94, a retired technical drawer who had worked for the gas board before it was sold off. He came down to find me most nights after the news, carrying a biscuit tin full of compasses and a torch he didn't need, and asked me to hold the light while he traced the stairwell walls with a pencil. He had been drawing on every surface he could reach for forty years, he said, because the council never looked up and nobody had ever stopped him. Every rosette in the building had a dot at its centre, and every dot was a place he had stood still long enough to count.

When the demolition notice went up in the lobby, I told him the walls would be painted over by the end of the month. He nodded as though I had given him the time. The next night he wasn't in his doorway, and his door was open on a bare room with a single chair and a tin of pencils set square on the sill.

I spent three weekends unrolling lining paper along each landing and tracing every pattern in the building, the hexagons, the stars, the faint rings around the lift shaft. When the painters came in the spring I rolled the paper up and carried it down the stairs under my arm, counting the steps out loud the way he always had.