Black ink Polynesian-style tribal sleeve covering the shoulder, upper arm and forearm of a bare-chested man.

Polynesian-style full arm sleeve

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of bold black tribal patterns runs from the shoulder over the upper arm and down to the forearm. The design uses thick solid black fills alongside fine parallel lines, chevrons, zigzags and dotted bands, arranged in interlocking panels and banding. The ink is entirely black against lightly tanned skin, with the photograph taken from a side angle against a plain dark grey wall.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Polynesian Tribal Sleeve Chevron Zigzag Band Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been on his knees since Lauds, lifting the broken tiles of the chapter house floor and laying them on a sack of wet sand. The pattern beneath was older than the abbey roof: bands of black and cream clay, chevrons marching in rows, zigzags like lightning caught in a jar, and between them a border of small dots the masons had pressed in with a nail. Nobody living had seen the whole floor. Anselm had the drawing, a sheet of vellum rolled so long it would not lie flat on the bench.

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Brother Ruairí, who had come up from the lowland mill to help with the lime, sat back on his heels and said what everyone said. "It's a lot of black for a floor meant to be walked on."

"It's meant to be walked on for six hundred years," said Anselm. "The black is the part that wears slowest."

They worked through the afternoon. The light came in low across the nave, and by vespers Anselm had found the seventh tile of the third panel, the one with the notched cross, and pressed it into the sand with his thumb. It sat flush. Ruairí whistled through his teeth.

Anselm wiped his hands and unrolled the vellum once more. The last panel was a corner the drawing showed only in outline, interlocking squares with the marks of a scribe's hesitation in them, half-crossed out. He had spent a winter wondering what the old mason meant to fill it with. Then he saw that the final tile was simply the first one again, turned a quarter, so the pattern could close on itself and begin.