Three views of a solid black Polynesian-style tribal tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm of a man's arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large tribal design covers the shoulder and upper arm, built from bold black spirals, circular forms, sawtooth edges and triangular bands. The solid black ink is applied with sharp, high-contrast edges and no shading or colour. The three panels show the same arm from the front, side and back, with the design wrapping around the shoulder and upper arm.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Tribal Polynesian Spiral 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

Nineteen days out from Ouloa, the wind dropped and the sea went flat as oiled slate, and the crew of the double canoe Karamea began to argue about whose fault it was. Old Tepaki said it was the boy's, for singing at the wrong hour. The boy, Minoa, said nothing, because he had counted the swells every morning and knew the current was pulling them west, not south as the others believed.

Keep reading

Tepaki's wife, Sefa, had carved the prow board herself, cutting spirals that turned inward like the eddies off a reef, and sawtooth edges along the rails for the teeth of the sharks that followed. She had never sailed farther than the lagoon. When the men fell silent she took a stick of charcoal and walked the length of the hull, drawing triangles on the wood where the swell broke over the bow in threes, the way Minoa had told her.

On the twentieth morning the sun rose behind them instead of ahead, and the men stopped arguing. Minoa dipped his hand in the water, tasted it, and said the reef-birds would be flying home by dusk. They were. By evening there were terns over the bow and a smell of wet leaves on the breeze, and Tepaki went to the prow and pressed his palm against the charcoal lines until they smudged across his skin.

Sefa never redrew the board. When they came ashore, Tepaki insisted the spirals stay as they were, black and rough, so anyone who came after could read the route the canoe had taken: a curl for every current, a point for every shark that had given up, and one wide band for the day the wind came back.