Black tribal sleeve tattoo with spirals, chevrons and triangles covering the shoulder and upper arm.

Polynesian-style tribal sleeve on upper arm

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tribal design covers the shoulder and upper arm, built from bold curling spirals, chevron bands and rows of triangles. The solid black areas contrast with the bare skin left in the cream-coloured lines, which follow the curve of the arm. The photograph is a close, slightly angled view against a dark background, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Shoulder Upper arm Tribal Spiral Chevron Triangle Circle Pattern

Find an artist for this

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

The adze had been her uncle's before it was hers, and by the third week of the rains Mere could feel its weight in her sleep. She began every prow with the spiral, because Tama said a curl at the bow kept a boat turning back toward the land when the sea wanted it gone. Mere had her doubts. The Kaimoana had carried a spiral like that onto the reef at Tapuae the winter before, and afterwards nobody found the spiral, only the planks.

Keep reading

Tama was dying slowly in the cot by the fire, and he had stopped correcting her cuts. Instead he asked for the sharkskin rasp, then the lamp, then the soot mixed with shell oil, and told her to draw the chevrons he could no longer hold a chisel to. Every band, he said, was a wave that had not finished arriving, and you counted them so you knew how far you had come. She counted the waves through the night, then the triangles, then lost her place and started again from the edge.

On the last morning of the rains she carved the new prow without a single spiral. She cut a koru instead, the young fern that unrolls slowly and keeps its tip pointing out to open water rather than curling back on itself. Tama watched from the doorway with his blanket around his shoulders. When she finally set down the adze he studied the bow for a long time, then looked at her and said the boat could go now, since she had stopped looking backwards.