Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an ornate spear or dagger running diagonally along a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate blade tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a forearm showing a long, ornate blade-like design running diagonally from the wrist towards the elbow. The design has a pointed tip, a decorated guard and banded sections along the shaft, drawn in solid black outlines with areas of black fill. The grey knitted sleeve and dark chair in the background are out of focus, keeping attention on the tattoo.

Blackwork Forearm Spear Dagger Blade Ornament

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 snow had already buried the lower post when Dorota came up the switchbacks, the long spear bound across her back in oilcloth. I kept the gate shut and the stove lit, because a woman who walks a pass in February has either a debt or a grudge, and I could see she carried neither in her hands.

Keep reading

She unwrapped it on my table beside the bread. The shaft was ash, banded every hand's width with bronze so the grip would not slip in frost, and the head had been cut to a leaf point, its guard worked into a pair of curled wings. Her grandfather, she said, had carried it over the Varda saddle the winter the bridge fell, and had driven it into the ice where the cairn now stands so the next traveller would know where the path held. He never came back down for it. She had come to take it back.

I told her the cairn had stood on that spear for forty years, that the drifts would bury every other marker, and I had no wish to climb out in the dark to find the road again. She listened, turned the blade so the stove light ran along its bands, and said her grandfather would have said the same. Then she wrapped it up again and asked whether I had a spare pole of plain ash, no bronze.

I found one in the lean-to. We walked up together at first light, the old spear in her arms and the plain pole in her fist. She pushed the banded shaft deep into the drift so its wings faced the road, then stood back. Going down, I looked over my shoulder and saw the sun catch its tip, a small hard point of light that would show the pass to anyone climbing blind.