Black tribal band tattoo in Polynesian-style patterns wrapping a forearm, with wave, chevron and checkerboard bands.

Polynesian-style bands on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is covered in stacked bands of black tribal-style patterns, including zigzags, wave scrolls, chevrons, a checkerboard strip and a line of hexagon-like shapes at the top. The linework is bold and solid black with no visible shading, and the design wraps around the full width of the arm. The photo is taken indoors against a window blind and a patterned carpet, with a grey top and dark shorts visible behind the arm.

Traditional Forearm Tribal Band Wave Chevron Zigzag Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father never drew a plank on paper. He chalked the bands straight onto the hull of the Mary Ann, working from the bottom up, and I was the one who held the string while he marked each line. Zigzags first, for the rake of the bow, then the wave scrolls where the planking turned under the sheer. He said a boat should wear her pattern like a kinsman's ring, so that anyone who knew the yard would know her from the far side of the harbour.

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The summer I was fourteen the checkerboard went on the stern, two rows of black squares that the caulkers swore would never sit square. Dad made me count them twice. Forty-two blocks, he said, one for every trip she had come home from, and I thought he was making it up until he showed me the tally scratched inside the locker lid, in his small careful hand, going back to his own father's time.

The autumn gales came early that year. Tom Harker's cutter went onto the Sandy Bar and we towed her in behind the Mary Ann, and when I saw her name in the wet paint I understood the bands were never decoration. They were a way of saying which way the tide ran, where the wind usually came from, what the sea was likely to do next.

We launched her in March with the chalk lines still faint on the planks. Dad pressed his palm flat against the chevrons and said nothing. That evening I carried the mallet home and cut the forty-third square into the locker lid myself.