Black and white Polynesian tribal sleeve design drawn as a full arm, with spirals, chevrons and wave motifs on a white background.

Polynesian tribal arm sleeve design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black and white tribal design drawn as a full arm sleeve, shown against a plain white background with no body visible. The design is built from solid black shapes, spirals, wave-like curls, chevrons and triangular bands, with white negative space giving the pattern its contrast. It is a single flat colour scheme with no shading gradients beyond the fine hatching in some areas.

Blackwork Polynesian Tribal pattern Spiral Wave Chevron Triangle

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 sea gave Tavita back his grandmother's comb the spring the reef went quiet. It came in on the tide wrapped in a fistful of wet pandanus, its teeth worn smooth, and he knew it before he knew why. Nobody on Fakaofo had seen her go into the water, but everyone had seen her walk out past the last coconut palm with her sleeves rolled and her basket on her hip, and nobody had seen her come back.

Keep reading

He took the comb to the old carver, Sione, who sat cross-legged under the breadfruit tree shaping a paddle with a shell adze. Sione turned it over and ran a thumb along the spiral cut into its handle, the one that curled inward like a wave folding over on itself. Then he said the spiral was not a decoration. It was a door, and the waves were the steps down to it, and the chevrons along the edge were the teeth of the sharks that kept watch. Tavita asked how a man might walk through a door like that. Sione said a man could not. He could only ask the sea to hold a lamp.

So Tavita went down at the turning of the tide with the comb in his teeth and a torch of dried coconut husk in his fist. The water pulled him down past black coral and past shelves of light that looked like paper. At the bottom he found her sitting on a stone ring, weaving a mat from threads of current, humming the song she sang when the pots were full. She did not look surprised. She tapped the empty place beside her and said, plainly, that the comb had been needed back in the village, and that he was late for it. He sat. They finished the mat together before the light went out of the water, and when he rose to climb home she pressed the comb back into his hand and told him to keep combing his own hair, because the sea had already taken enough of her.