Black and grey dotwork and blackwork tattoo of a symmetrical ornamental band with geometric leaf shapes wrapping around the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental geometric band on a wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical ornamental band wraps around the wrist, with a star-like motif at the top and layered pointed leaf shapes descending towards the hand. Solid black outlines and fills are combined with fine stippled dots that build shading and texture. The image is monochrome, with the hand resting on a dark leather surface and the tattoo centred in the frame.

Dotwork Blackwork Geometric Forearm Ornament Mandala Geometric pattern Wrist band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire is only half-hearted tonight, and you will want to hear how the silversmith of Skerray Quay made the cuff before the tide climbs the slipway and drowns the lamps. Old Tam Gillies worked in a shed with one window, and every winter the widows of the boats came asking for the same thing: something to keep a drowned man's name close to the wrist. He never made the same pattern twice.

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The year the Morag went down off the Stacks, Ailsa Ferrier came with a sheet of paper folded small in her apron. On it she had drawn a star, the one her grandmother painted over the byre door to turn back the storms, and beneath it a row of leaves, each pointed like a gull folding its wings. She wanted it dotted, not polished, so the marks would catch the lamplight only when the hand moved. Tam said the metal would not hold such a thing. She said then he would have to teach it.

He worked through the Lent gales, punching each dot with a nail and a hammer until his thumb swelled the colour of a mussel shell. Every leaf he cut deeper than the last, and each time he thought the band was finished, another row of points pushed up from beneath like shoots through frost. On the final night he counted nine layers and understood he had made one for every man on the boat. He had not meant to. He had only kept going.

When Ailsa came for it, she turned the cuff under the lamp and read the inside, where he had scratched nothing at all. Then she fastened it on and the star sat steady above her pulse. Leave the top layer empty, she said, that's for whoever comes home. So he did, and that is why the Skerray men still say the blackest dots on the island are the ones nearest the sea.