Black and grey tattoo of a checkerboard pattern melting into drips down a forearm, with soft shaded edges.

Melting checkerboard pattern on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a checkerboard pattern of black and white squares that appears to melt and drip downwards in long, tapering forms. The squares are crisp in places and softened by grey shading that fades towards the top of the design. The image is a close, straight-on photograph of the forearm against a red patterned fabric background.

Geometric Forearm Drip Pattern

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 last of the frost had gone off the orchard wall by the time Marguerite finished the board, but the squares refused to sit still. She had painted sixty-four of them on a sheet of pale elm, black and bone, and when she held it up to the kitchen window in the early light the rows seemed to lean, as if someone had left the whole thing out in a warm kitchen and let it slump. Her brother Tom called it a mistake. He said a board should be flat or it should be firewood.

Keep reading

She took it anyway to the village fair in Little Wenham, propped it against the cider crate, and set out the pieces her grandmother had carved from bog oak. Nobody wanted to play on it. A boy in a green anorak put his finger on a black square near the top, then pulled it back as though the wood had gone warm. An old man from the lock-keeper's cottage bent close and said the drips were the only honest thing he'd seen all year, because everything else in the village stayed exactly where it was put.

So she sold it to him for four pounds and a jar of quince jam. On the drive home she passed the orchard and saw the frost-bitten wall, and for a moment the stones beneath the lichen looked like squares slipping down into the grass, black and bone, patient as wax. She pulled the van over and sat with the engine running, watching the light go, until the pattern settled back into bricks.