Black Polynesian-style tribal tattoo covering a bent upper arm and the back of the shoulder, shown from behind against a plain wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal sleeve on upper arm and shoulder

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A full arm sleeve of dense black tribal patterns covers the upper arm and wraps over the back of the shoulder, with bands of chevrons, triangles, curved lines and radiating motifs. The bold black linework is solid and symmetrical, with the negative skin left between the shapes. The image is black and grey, with the skin tone and a plain pale wall forming the background.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Polynesian Tribal pattern Sleeve Chevron Triangle Arm

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

Mrs Idris Calloway had been counting the bands on the old Kingston Black since breakfast, and by the time the wasps found the windfalls she had reached forty-one. Her son Owen came round the end of the rows with a crate on each hip and found her crouched at the trunk, tracing the black lines with one fingertip as if they might smudge.

Keep reading

"Who cut these?" he asked. "Your grandfather, with a hot nail and a bad temper," she said. He had come home from the navy with a stack of pattern books and a notion that the orchard needed something worth keeping. Each summer after that he added a band: triangles where the rain ran off, chevrons where the wasps liked to crawl. He never finished it. He used to say a thing that's never finished never gets rot in it.

Owen set the crates down. Late light came slantwise through the boughs and laid the shadows of the leaves across the bark, so the cuts seemed to shift as he looked. "It goes round," he said. "Like a sleeve, Mam." She saw it then: the bands wrapped the trunk like tide-marks, one pattern running into the next, and the bare grey bark between them the only thing left unbroken.

She fetched the nail from the shed and handed it over. He held it a long while above the last bare stretch, then cut a single triangle pointing down and blew the dust from the groove. "That'll do for this year," she said, and went in to start the supper, leaving the tree to keep its own count.