Close view of a forearm with a bold geometric tattoo in black, orange and teal, held beside a woman's hands holding silver hoop earrings.

Geometric tribal pattern on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a green striped dress holds silver hoop earrings and a ring in her open palms, with her left forearm visible. The forearm tattoo is a bold geometric design of stepped zigzags, chevrons and diamond shapes that runs diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow. The thick black outlines are filled with orange, teal and green, and the soft, neutral background keeps the focus on the arm.

Geometric Forearm Geometric pattern Zigzag Chevron Diamond Tribal Earring Hand

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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 wind up here has ears and likes to gossip. You see the road below us, folding back on itself like a letter nobody finished? Nineteen turns, and every one of them has a mark painted on the rock wall at its elbow. Stepped marks, zigzags, little diamonds. My grandmother's grandmother put them there, and she did not paint them for the carters. She painted them for the mules.

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The mules of that pass were not clever animals, whatever people say, but they were patient, and patience remembers a pattern better than a man remembers a promise. When the fog came down thick as wet wool, as it did every autumn, a drover could lose the road in the time it takes to cough. So the old woman ground her colours from the hills: ochre for the inn's bread ovens, green for the pasture below, and a teal she took from the lake water in a clay jar. She set the colours into the chevrons so each turn had its own shape, and she taught the lead mule to read them with its nose against the stone.

Now, there was a boy named Tomas, sent up with his father's string of mules the winter the snow came early. The fog took them at the ninth turn. He panicked, shouted, and pulled the wrong rein. The lead mule stood still with its nose to the rock and would not move until it found the diamond beside the teal. Tomas put his palm flat on the painted stone, felt the cold ridge of the old colour under his fingers, and laughed like a fool. Then he walked the string down, turn by turn, by the marks. Nobody has lost a mule on this pass since.