Black linework tattoo covering a forearm in lattice, dot and bands patterns, with geometric and dotwork styling, photographed in black and grey.

Geometric lattice sleeve on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is covered from the elbow towards the wrist with black geometric patterns, including interlaced lattice panels, dotted diamonds, looping curved lines, spirals and bands of chevrons and diagonal strokes. The linework is crisp and uniform, with solid black areas and fine dots, and the tattoo appears in black ink only. The arm is shown at an angle against a dark background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame and a printed black and white shirt and cross necklace visible behind it.

Geometric Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Lattice Geometric pattern Dot Diamond Spiral Chevron Band Sleeve

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the guard at the bridge has stopped counting us. So. My grandmother's cousin Bahar carried a pattern on her arm across three frontiers, and not one officer ever asked to see it. They looked at her papers, then at her bag, then at the lattice running from her elbow to her wrist, and they simply looked away, the way you do from a stranger's prayer.

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It was not ink then. It was a cloth, a long runner woven at Kars in a winter when the snow came in sideways. Every diamond with its dot was a day of counting threads, and the spirals at the cuffs were the places where she had grown impatient and had to start again. Her husband wanted the design printed on paper so it could be sold in the bazaars. She refused. Paper goes soft in the rain, she said, and skin does not.

At the last crossing, a clerk with a cold moustache asked what the chevrons meant. Bahar told him they were the steps a river takes when it has been told to wait. He laughed, stamped her book, and let her through. She walked into a country whose language she did not speak, and she made the pattern again on her own arm with a needle and soot, one dot at a time, so that no customs man could unroll the cloth and take it from her.

Count the dots, child. If the number comes out the same as the years she lived, you may keep the pattern. If not, you must carry it across yourself.