Black ink Polynesian tribal sleeve tattoo covering a man's upper arm and shoulder, with bold solid bands and geometric patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal full arm sleeve

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man with the head cropped out shows a full arm sleeve of tribal ornament across his upper arm and shoulder. Solid black fills alternate with fine and bold linework, forming bands of chevrons, triangles, stepped motifs and radiating lines. The black and grey ink is set against his skin tone, and the design wraps around the arm with a dense, symmetrical composition.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Tribal pattern Chevron Triangle Band Radiating lines Sleeve

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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

You learned the pattern from your uncle's hands before you ever learned the seam. He drew on the backs of pay packets while the cage sank, chevrons for the roof falls he had outlived, a stepped border for every shift that ended with the whistle. Down at Hollin Pit they called him Sunday Tom because he never went below on the Lord's day, though he kept a pick in the corner of every room he worked.

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The summer the colliery closed, you walked the spoil heaps with a tin of black ink and a sewing needle bound with thread. The ink was for the boys who wanted their sweethearts' names on their arms. The rest of the pattern you kept for yourself, bands running from wrist to shoulder, radiating lines spreading out from the elbow like the rays off a lamp in a dark gallery.

Nobody in Hollin wanted the tenth band. The men who came back from the Kent coalfield said it looked like a fence or a cage, and your mother said it looked like the bolts they drove into the roof the week before the fall. You didn't argue. You let it heal, and it did, black and dense against the skin, the way a seam looks when the light comes in from the top.

Last March the new manager came up the lane with a clipboard and asked whether the old pit had a memorial. You rolled your sleeve up. He looked at the lines, counted the bands with one finger in the air, and said nothing for a long time. Then he asked where the pattern came from. You told him it came from the back of a pay packet, and that every line was a shift someone had come up from.