Black and grey Polynesian tribal sleeve tattoo covering the shoulder, upper arm and forearm, with woven and geometric bands.

Polynesian tribal sleeve on upper arm and forearm

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of bold black tribal patterns, with a woven basket-weave panel across the shoulder and upper arm. Bands of triangles, chevrons, zigzags and lattice lines run down the arm to the forearm, with grey shading in places. The photograph is taken from the side and cropped below the chin, with the person wearing a black vest.

Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Tribal pattern Triangle Chevron Zigzag Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways into the market at Hollin Quay the morning Ada Mirrow sold her last basket for a single copper coin. Stallholders dragged tarpaulins over their fish and cloth, and the cobbles ran brown with water. Ada had been weaving since she was six, reed over reed, and her baskets held rain better than any roof in the town.

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A stranger ducked under her awning with his collar up and a cracked clay jar in both hands. He said it had been his grandmother's, that it leaked on the boat, and that he owed the ferryman three days' wages. Ada turned the jar over, shook her head, and wove him a basket tight as a drum. She worked chevrons into the rim, and triangles along the base like the teeth of a comb. When he asked why the pattern climbed so, she told him the lattice was the net that kept the fish from the boats, and the zigzags were the rain falling on the reef. He nodded as if she had said something wiser than she knew.

He paid her with river stones, which she refused, and then with a story, which she accepted. He told her of a valley where the water came down every spring and nobody built a wall against it. They built baskets instead, lashed them to the rafters, and let the floods pass through the weave.

The flood came eleven days later. Ada's stall stood under the new water line, and her stock floated off down the lane. At dawn she found the stranger's basket on her step, still tight, full of dry rice and the copper coin. Along its rim was one band she had never woven, a row of small diamonds that matched nothing she knew. She sat with it in her lap until the sun came up, then she took her reed and began a new band of her own beneath it.