Black and grey Polynesian style tribal sleeve covering a man's upper arm and shoulder, with bold black bands and shaded geometric panels.

Polynesian style full arm sleeve

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal sleeve runs from the shoulder down the upper arm and onto the outer forearm, filling the arm with interlocking bands, spirals and geometric blocks. The linework is heavy and solid black, with shaded grey fills that give the square and chevron motifs depth. The photograph is taken from the side against an indoor background, with the subject's head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Polynesian Tribal Sleeve Spiral Chevron Geometric pattern Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marta Venn had three days to finish the sternboard for the Halcyon Rose, and the pattern her grandfather left her refused to sit still. She laid his tracing across the workbench in the boatshed at Penhallow Cove, weighted its corners with two chisels and a tin of linseed, and tried again to read it the way he had. Bands ran up the board like a river in flood, chevrons stacked like the teeth of a saw, and every few inches a spiral curled tight as a sleeping dog's back.

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"You're copying the wrong side," said Dev Okafor from the doorway, a mug of tea steaming in each hand. He had come up from the slipway with the tide out and a sunburn already blooming across his neck. "Your grandad drew it looking at the water, not the wood." He set one mug beside the tracing and tapped the spiral nearest the edge. "That's the eddy off the point. The blocks are the rocks it breaks against."

She had never thought of the pattern as weather. She turned the paper over and held it to the window, and the lines slid into a shape she knew: the cove on a bad morning, the swell rising grey and then folding back on itself. She took up the gouge and began on the spiral, cutting with the grain instead of against it, and the wood came away in clean curls that smelled of cedar and salt.

By dusk the sternboard was finished, black and sharp-edged where the cuts ran deepest and paler where her grandfather had shaded with a rag and pumice. Dev hung the lantern on its hook and stood back. "Looks like it'll hold a storm," he said. Marta ran her thumb along the last chevron and didn't answer, because she was already working out where the light would fall, so the spirals would catch it the way the sea did at dawn.