Black Polynesian-style tribal tattoo with swirling bands wrapping around an ankle and up onto the top of the foot, in a black and grey photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian-style tribal band on an ankle

Blackwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal design of solid black swirls, curves and bands wraps around the ankle and runs onto the top of the foot. The linework is heavy and filled, with negative space creating the scrolling shapes. The photograph is black and grey, set against a background of patterned black and white fabric.

Blackwork Ankle Tribal Swirl Wave Band Ankle Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Forty-one days out from the reef, the water in the cask had gone the colour of weak tea, and Iti Marama still would not let anyone touch the steering oar. She sat on the stern thwart counting swells the way her grandmother had taught her, one curl of the hull for each wave that lifted them and set them down again. The younger men called it superstition. Her father had called it arithmetic.

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On the fortieth night the swell turned. It came from the north-east, long and slow, and it wrapped around the canoe like a rope being coiled by someone with all the time in the world. Iti felt it in the oar before she saw it in the sky. She turned the bow into the curl and held it there while the others bailed and cursed and prayed in turns.

At dawn a single black spine of land rose out of the haze, and beneath it lay a lagoon the colour of glass. The men wept openly. Iti did not. She ran her thumb along the carved scroll on the sternpost, the same wave pattern that ran in bands across the sails and the tapa cloth and the faces of the old ancestors on the reef shrine, and she said only, "Forty-one," which was the number of days, and also the number of times the sea had tried to take them and failed.