Black tattoo of a tribal band with spirals and chevron patterns wrapped around a forearm, resting on a dark towel.

Polynesian-style band tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A wide band of black tribal-style design wraps around the arm, built from large spirals, curling scroll shapes and fine chevron and herringbone infill. Solid black areas sit against thin outlined sections, giving strong contrast across the band. The arm lies horizontally on a dark textured towel, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Spiral Tribal pattern Chevron Band Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canoe had been dragged up over the black sand at Motu Tapu, and Aroha's grandmother said the spirals on its hull were the same spirals that lived in the fern heads, and that a carver who copied one would be copying a promise. Tomas had heard this so many times that he only half listened, scraping pitch from the gunwale with a shell. The tide was going out. Out past the reef, the water was the colour of slate, and the wind had turned north.

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His brother Hemi had gone out at dawn to check the traps on the outer ledge. He had taken the small sail because the big one was torn, and he had promised to be back before the noon bell rang from the mission at the far point. The bell had rung twice now. Aroha did not say so. She went down the line of boats, touching each prow, and when she reached the last one she knelt and drew with her fingernail a curl that folded in on itself and then unfolded outward, like a shoot that refuses to stay in one place.

It was Tomas who saw the sail first, a grey smudge against the reef where the swell broke white. He did not shout. He pushed the second boat down the sand and the others followed him without being asked, and the women came behind with rope and bark cloth. Hemi was lying in the bottom of his own canoe with one arm bound against his ribs and his face turned to the sky, laughing at nothing. The traps were full.

When they got him ashore, Aroha unwrapped the cloth from his arm and found the old pattern there, the band of black spirals her grandmother had inked into them both as children, and it had held. Tomas touched the sharp chevrons of the herringbone and thought that a thing made so carefully could be trusted to bring a man home.