Black and grey hand-drawn Polynesian-style tattoo design of spirals and triangular blades with fine hatching, shown as a flash sheet.

Polynesian-style spiral and triangle design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a vertical arrangement of interlocking spirals and tapering triangular blade shapes, resembling a tribal-style sleeve or band design. The shapes are filled with dense hatching, cross-hatching and small triangular dot patterns along the edges, drawn in fine black ink on white. The composition is tall and narrow, with the motifs staggered down the page and each shape separated by open white space.

Blackwork Spiral Triangle Tribal Polynesian Hatching Design

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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

Mother Hanne always said the tide had a grammar, and that a boy who could read the eddies off the harbour wall would never need a chart. So when the Marigold went out that October with my brother Tam at the bow, I stood on the slip with my hands in my apron and watched the water do its curling and uncurling around the pilings. The spirals were the first thing I learned to read. Each one turns in on itself like a sheep's horn or a fern, and where two of them meet they push a blade of current out sideways, sharp as a gutting knife.

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For three days the wind stayed in the north and the boats came in empty. On the fourth morning I walked out to the end of the breakwater with a tin of tar and a brush, because Hanne had told me that if you paint the sign of the turning water on the hull, the sea remembers it belongs to you. I painted the first spiral wrong. It came out too loose, a lazy thing, and the wind rose on the very stroke. I stopped, scraped it off with a knife, and started again, tighter, the way she'd shown me with her finger on the table: draw inward, then let the tail flick out into a point.

The Marigold came in at dusk with her nets heavy and Tam grinning like a fool. He ran his palm along the wet black mark on her bow and laughed. Next season, he said, we'll paint the whole fleet. I told him he'd have to learn to draw the tail first. The water still moves the way I taught it to.