Black and grey geometric sleeve tattoo running from the upper arm to the elbow, featuring a sunburst and a flower of life motif.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric sleeve with sunburst and flower of life

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of geometric design, with a radiating sunburst pattern near the top, a flower of life motif inside a circle, and tessellated cubes and hexagons lower down towards the elbow. The work combines fine black linework, solid black hexagon fills and densely patterned grey areas to build depth. The image is black and grey, and the pattern follows the curve of the arm against a dark background.

Geometric Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Sunburst Flower of life Hexagon Cube Mandala Sleeve Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chalk never sits still on the slate, so you learn to draw in the cold hours before the cage goes down, when the lamp oil has thickened and the pit yard is grey as a slag heap. Your father taught you to strike a circle with a length of string and a nail, then six more circles around it, then six more, until the whole sheet blooms like frost on a window. Nobody in Sallow Bank asks what the drawings are for. They ask whether the ventilation doors hang true.

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Mr Tennant pays you a shilling a sheet to copy the designs onto the washhouse tiles, and you do it by hand, one hexagon at a time, black glaze pressed into the grout with a bone knife. The men call it the pattern shop. You call it arithmetic that happens to be beautiful. When the foreman's boy asks why the sunburst has ninety-six rays, you tell him what your father told you: a star is only a hundred small instructions obeyed at once.

The winter the seam flooded, you were sent down with the rescue party to measure the old workings, and you carried your slate because your hands did not know how to be empty. Water stood to the knee. You drew the cross-section of the shaft by touch in the dark, cube after cube, the edges sharp as sums. When they hauled you up, Tennant read the sheet under the lamp and said nothing for a long time.

Next spring he had the bathhouse floor relaid to your drawing, a flower of life set in a ring of black hexagons, and the wall above it limewashed the grey of wet slate. On a Saturday you can watch the men stand on it with their boots dripping, looking down, counting the circles without knowing they are counting. You want to tell them the pattern goes on past the last tile. Instead you hold the door and let the steam out first.