Black tribal tattoo covering a shirtless man's shoulder and upper arm, in a blackwork style with a large central circular motif.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian-style tribal shoulder and arm tattoo

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design covers the shoulder and upper arm, with a large circular motif at its centre surrounded by spirals, solid curved shapes and fine geometric bands. The linework is solid and the fills are dense black, with pale skin showing between the shapes. The photograph is taken from the side and cropped at the neck and waist, with a plain dark background.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Tribal Polynesian Spiral Geometric pattern Band

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drawing had been folded into quarters so many times that the creases had gone soft as cloth. Mrs Adeyemi kept it in a biscuit tin with the spare keys, and on the Tuesday the lift went out she unfolded it on my landing, fourteen floors up on Calder House, and asked me to hold the corners flat while she counted the stairs.

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A ring sat at the centre, cut across by four short arms, like a sun seen from above. Around it the lines spiralled outward, tight at first and then looser, the way the cable winds on the drum at the bottom of the shaft. Between the spirals ran thick solid shapes like waves, and between those, bands of fine zigzags that her nephew had copied from a library book and then drawn again, bigger, for a man in Leeds who needed his shoulder covered.

We went down the stairs first, because she said you should always start at the bottom of a design. Each landing had a number painted in black on the wall, and each number matched a band on the paper. Seven was a row of little diamonds. Nine had the wave shapes. At the fourth floor she stopped to rest and tapped the spiral with a fingernail. "It's meant to bring you back to where you began," she said. "That's the whole trick of it."

We came up again, slower, with the paper in my hands. On fourteen, I saw that the circle on the drawing had been traced from the gloss-black door of our own flat, the one with the dented letterbox and the scrap of tinsel nailed to it. Mrs Adeyemi pressed the outer spiral with her thumb, and the lift doors opened behind us with a clank, as if they had been waiting for her to find the way.