Black tribal tattoo in a Polynesian style covering the shoulder and upper arm of a person, with bold chevron bands and solid black fills.

Polynesian-style tribal shoulder and arm sleeve

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal design covers the shoulder and upper arm, built from curved bands, chevron rows, zigzag lines and a fan-like pattern at the elbow end. Solid black fills alternate with fine outlines and dotted borders, with the lighter skin showing through the chevron shapes. The photograph is taken against a black background, with the tattoo filling the left side of the frame and the torso only partly visible.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Tribal Chevron Sleeve Zigzag Band Fan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canoe had been dragged up onto the black sand three days before the storm, and Mere still hadn't finished lashing the outrigger. Her brother Tane sat on the hull with a shell adze, scraping at the same knot of hibiscus bark until it bled white. He was angry because the old woman had told him the boat would not carry him past the reef unless he carried the reef's marks first.

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So they went to the carver's house at the end of the point, where Nana Hine kept her tools wrapped in tapa and the designs stacked in her head like fish on a line. She did not draw on paper. She took Tane's upper arm in her cool hands and pressed it flat against the mat, then began with a single curved band that followed the muscle the way a current follows a hull. Chevrons came next, row after row, pointing toward the heart, because she said a man should always know which way home was. Tane bit the wood of a fallen branch and did not cry out.

When the sun went down behind the palms, the arm was swollen and dark, and Hine tapped the fan shape at the elbow with a fingernail. "That is for the wind," she said. "It will spread when you let it." In the morning Tane pushed the canoe into the lagoon alone, the chevrons stinging with salt, and the outrigger rose clean over the first swell as if it had been waiting for him.