Black and grey tattoo covering the back of a hand and forearm with bold tribal-style geometric motifs and a central face-like design.

Geometric tribal-style hand and forearm tattoo

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of an open hand and forearm covered in dense black linework tribal-style patterns, with spirals, interlocking key shapes and a large central motif resembling a stylised face with concentric circles and a toothed grin. The fingers carry narrower repeating geometric bands, and the forearm continues the pattern with rings and a circular emblem. The plain black background isolates the hand, with dramatic lighting that emphasises the contrast between the dark ink and the pale skin.

Geometric Blackwork Hand Forearm Tribal Face Spiral Geometric pattern Concentric circle Emblem

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

You find the face on the third morning after the gale, lodged between two black rocks below the landing stage, carved from driftwood no longer than your forearm. Someone has worked it with a gouge and then a hot iron, so the spirals stand proud of the grain. Two round eyes are cut in rings, one inside the other, and beneath them the mouth opens in a grin of triangular teeth. Mr Abernethy would have called it rubbish and thrown it on the fire, but you carry it up the spiral stair in your coat pocket and set it on the sill of the lamp room, where the glass throws back your reflection in a dozen pieces.

Keep reading

The log that winter records the lamp burning steadily and nothing else. You begin to notice the carvings on the cabinet doors below, keys and interlocking hooks you have polished past a hundred times without really seeing. Each night you trace one with your thumb while the wick trims itself. The fog comes in thick through February, the foghorn drowns out the gulls, and twice you hear the little face knock against the sill as if the sea were rocking it, though the sea is forty feet down.

In March the mail boat's skipper rows out to ask why the light has been so steady. He says the Caroline Mae came round the Skerry in a white blackout and saw the beam land exactly where it should. You tell him nothing about the carving. He glances past you at the sill, laughs a little uneasily, and goes back down the steps without taking his tea.

That evening you climb up with the lamp oil and a tin of black paint. You work the spirals onto the iron railing and the keys onto the glass frames, one stroke at a time, until the whole tower wears the pattern. The face you leave where it sits, grinning at the water. When the light turns on, its beam sweeps out across the dark, and somewhere a boat you cannot see turns toward it.