Black and grey Polynesian-style tribal tattoo with spirals and triangles wrapping the upper arm, with stippled dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian-style tribal upper arm tattoo

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tribal design covers the upper arm, built around a central circular motif of spirals and scrolls. Bold solid black bands and triangular points sit alongside areas of fine stippled dotwork shading. The design wraps around the arm in black and grey ink against a pale, softly lit skin tone, with the pattern filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Spiral Tribal pattern Triangle Wave Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The harbour at Skerrow had nineteen boats and one woman who could read the sea by the colour of its spit. Her name was Ada Lowrie, and when the Kittiwake went out past the breakwater one grey morning without its skipper, the men said the sea had taken him. Ada said the sea was too lazy for that and sent her son Tam to bring the boat back.

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Tam took the small punt out past the rocks, where the current turned on itself like a dog chasing its tail. He found the Kittiwake drifting in circles, its wheel lashed, the skipper asleep under a tarpaulin with one hand wrapped round a rope. The spirals on the water were the same spirals the old carvers had cut into the lintel of the net shed, curling inward toward a still eye at the centre where the wind could not reach.

He could not lift the skipper alone, so he did what his grandmother had taught him. He counted the peaks of the swell, one, two, three, the teeth of the sea, and rowed between them on the beat. Each wave he met he greeted by name, as she had told him to, and each one lifted the punt a little and set it down a little nearer the harbour.

By dusk they were tied at the quay. Ada took her son's chin in her hand, looked at the salt on his collar, and said nothing about the danger. Next morning she painted a ring of white dots around the Kittiwake's bow, the way the old women did, so the sea would know whose boat it was.