Black dotwork and blackwork tattoo on a forearm showing a hand, a lighthouse, a crescent moon and stars inside a large triangle, with smaller triangles below.

Lighthouse, hand and night sky in a triangle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large geometric tattoo on the inner forearm shows an open hand at its centre, with a circular inset of mountains under a starry night sky. A lighthouse, crescent moon and stars fill the upper triangle, and flower or leaf shapes surround the hand. The work is done in black ink using fine stippling and dotted shading for the sky and linework for the outlines, with no colour.

Dotwork Blackwork Geometric Forearm Lighthouse Hand Moon Star Night sky Mountain Triangle Flower

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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

Mind the step, it's the third board from the door and it has always been loose. Right, quiet now, the candles can wait. I'll tell this once before the cake comes out. On the rock at Skerryvane stood a lighthouse with a gallery rail that rattled in a westerly, and the keeper up there was Tobias Quayle, who had a habit of holding up his right hand whenever a boat looked like it might miss the channel.

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Nobody asked him why. The men on the mainland thought it was a wave to their wives. It wasn't. He had lost two fingers to a winch in his twenties, and the hand he raised was the one his mother had inked with the hills of home before he went to sea, so those mountains would always be in his sight. Each night, once the lamp was lit and the moon rose over the water like a coin pushed through a slot, he sat with his palm open and counted the stars showing through the cloud. Eleven, some nights. Twelve, if the sea was kind.

One November a fishing smack came in blind, with a girl aboard who had never trusted a rock she couldn't lean on. Tobias stood at the rail and raised his hand, and the boat turned on the sight of it as if the hand were a lamp of its own. They came in on the tide. The girl stepped onto the stone, looked back at him and said, 'Your hand's shaking.' He said it was only the cold. She said it was the hills, and she was right, because the sea spray had run the ink and the mountains had gone soft at the edges.

So that's where the steady hands come from, if you want the truth. Lift your glasses. Tobias married that girl the spring after, and she kept the lamp lit while he slept. Now, come up here where I can see you, and bring that hand of yours.