Black tribal tattoo in Polynesian style with bands of triangles and chevrons wrapping around a limb, with a hand visible at the upper right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian-style bands on a limb

Geometric · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers a limb in wide bands of bold geometric tribal patterns, including triangles, chevrons, and parallel lines. The linework is heavy and solid black, with grey shading that gives the bands depth and a slightly raised look. The design wraps fully around the limb and fills most of the frame, with a patterned blue backdrop and a partly visible hand at the upper right.

Geometric Other Tribal Polynesian Triangle Chevron Band Geometric pattern Hand

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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 rain came sideways off the harbour by eleven, so I dragged the tarpaulin tighter over the trestle and moved the good cloth to the back of the van. Stall ten at the Sutton market had sold nothing since nine. Mum always said the weather picks who stays, and I stayed, mostly out of stubbornness.

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Then a man in a yellow cagoule stopped at the edge of the awning and asked whether I had the wave block. Nobody asks about printed cotton like that. I knew the one he meant: a lino block my uncle Teva carved in the back room of his flat in Leith, thirty years of chevrons and triangles running in bands like a tide that couldn't make up its mind. Uncle had worked it from a pattern he'd kept in his head since his own grandfather's day, though he never said so out loud. I told the man it was in a drawer at home. He said he'd wait.

I drove to the flat that afternoon with the wipers squeaking. The block sat wrapped in an old tea towel, its raised lines dulled by years of ink. I pressed it onto a sheet of paper and lifted it, and the print came up clean: bands stacked one above the other, each a little tighter than the last, until the edge of the sheet looked like something that had been wound round a post and kept on going.

When I got back the stall was empty and the man was gone. A fifty-pound note lay under a stone on the trestle, with a scrap beside it in pencil: keep the block, I have the other half. I turned my print over. On the back were the same chevrons, counted in pairs, and under them one word in Uncle's hand: mine.