Black and white photo of two clasped hands, each forearm wearing a solid black band tattoo in a blackwork style on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching black bands on two clasped forearms

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown with hands clasped together against a plain white background. Each arm has a solid black band tattoo wrapping around the forearm, with smooth, even fill and crisp edges. The image is monochrome and tightly framed, with soft lighting that shows the skin texture and the bands clearly.

Blackwork Forearm Band Armband Hand Holding hands

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

The dyke behind Hollis Farm froze so hard that January that the water beneath it went quiet. Ruth and I were nine and eleven, and the calf had gone through at the bend, where the current never quite gives up. Dad was across the far field on the tractor, too far away to hear us shout, so we didn't.

Keep reading

We didn't argue about it either. Ruth lay flat on the ice and I lay across her boots, and she reached down for the calf's ear while I held her wrist. Then her fingers found mine and we became a chain of two, with the wind coming off the Wash like a blade. The calf kicked. The ice cracked in a long white sentence that ran away under us. Neither of us let go, not even when my fingers stopped being fingers and turned into something I couldn't feel.

When the calf was up and steaming in the barn, Ruth's mother cut two strips from an old black oilcloth table cover and tied one round each of our forearms, tight enough to leave a red ridge. She said nothing would shift that mark. She was right. We were grown before we had the bands inked properly, in a back room above a chip shop in Boston, and the man doing it said the lines would hold longer than the cloth ever would.

Every thaw since, I walk down to the bend with my sleeves pushed up. The water runs loud and brown over the place where we held on, and the bands stay as dark as the night we made them.