Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal sleeve design

Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a full sleeve design in the Polynesian tribal manner. A stylised face with spiral eyes sits at the top, above bands of spirals, chevrons, hatched panels and wave-like forms. The linework is bold and even on a plain white background, with no colour or shading beyond solid black fills and hatching.

Polynesian Tribal Face Spiral Wave Chevron Geometric pattern

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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 down, the lot of you, and keep your hands out of the bait tubs while I talk. Your grandfather was on the Mairi Dhu the night she went out past the Grey Teeth, and he told this to me the way I'm telling it to you, with his boots up on the stove rail and a dram going cold beside him.

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It was a thick morning in March. The nets came up heavy, and when Tam Gorrie hauled the first one over the gunwale it was no fish that filled it but ropes of weed wound into rings, spiral after spiral, laced through with ridges like the backs of waves. Then the water in the hold went still as a plate, and a face came up under the bow. Two eyes coiled tight as rope-ends, a mouth cut in hatched bands, a brow like a row of saw teeth. Nobody screamed. Your grandfather said that was the worst of it, how quiet they all went.

Angus Lennie had the knife. He was the oldest man aboard and the only one who had seen that face before, carved on the post of his own father's boat when he was a boy. He didn't cut the nets. He took a handful of the weed, knotted it round his wrist in a chevron, and spoke to the water the way you'd speak to a dog that had wandered into the wrong kitchen. The face sank. The tide, which had run the wrong way all morning, swung round and carried them home.

They came into the harbour with nothing in the hold but their own skins. Angus carved a spiral and three chevrons into the wheelhouse door that week, and it's still there. Mind your fingers on it when you go past. The sea likes a thing that's been paid attention to, and so do I.