Black tribal tattoo in Polynesian style covering the upper arm, shoulder and chest of a bare-chested man against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal shoulder and chest tattoo

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design covers the upper arm, shoulder and part of the chest, built from thick bands, chevrons, arrows and triangular blocks. The linework is solid and heavy, with some fine inner detail and soft shading that gives the pattern depth across the muscle. The image is shot in warm, low light against a black background, and the design flows across the body's curves.

Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Chest Tribal pattern Chevron Arrow Triangle Zigzag Band Polynesian

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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

Sit closer, the lamp only lights one face at a time. Forty years after the Reach left the last green hill behind, the star-glass cracked over the Gilbert Deep and nobody aboard could tell north from the hull. Old Sefa Lau had the instruments pulled apart by then. She sat in the galley with her sleeves pushed up and said, Bring me the blue ink and the bone needle, and I'll show you the sea the way my grandmother showed it to me.

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The marks were her chart. The thick bands were the long swells that never broke, the ones you could ride for a week without touching the wheel. The chevrons were reef-teeth, sharp enough to feel through a hull, so you knew to lift off the throttle before you heard them. The triangles were the sails of the old boats, and the arrows were bearings, each one pointing where a crossing had been made safely. Every child on the ship could read them before they could read their letters, and every one of them had been told never to trust an arrow that pointed at the dark.

The crew argued for three days, because the arrows on her arm pointed out past the bow, toward a reef no one had charted. On the fourth morning Sefa climbed to the bridge with the lamp in her hand. She traced the longest arrow, the one that ran from her shoulder down across her chest, and laughed at them. It did not point out at all, she said. It pointed down, to the hydroponic bay where the first seedlings had been grown in salt water, to the place the swells had always carried us back to. They turned the Reach around. The arrows had never been wrong; she had simply trusted the wrong end of them.