Black Polynesian-style tribal tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, with bold triangles, bands and fine hatched fills.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Polynesian tribal upper arm and shoulder

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a large tribal tattoo wrapping over a bare upper arm and the top of the shoulder, shown against a white tank top and a dark green textured background. The design uses solid black bands, rows of triangles, chevrons, hatched fills and a dotted line that curve around the arm. The ink is pure black with no grey shading, and the composition fills the frame from the shoulder down to the elbow area.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Tribal pattern Triangle Chevron Band Hatching Dotted line 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, child, where the lamp can reach you. My mother's brother Teva went out past the reef the week the rains came early, and he took the good net with him, the one with the little dots knotted along its edge so the fishing spirits could count what came up in it.

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Every evening after that, my mother sat on the step and tied one more knot in a cord, a dot for each night he was gone. She tied the bands and the sawtooth edges too, so the sea would know which way home lay. The chevrons were the waves running in toward the shore, all turned the same way. She said if you drew the sea correctly, it would be ashamed to keep anything that belonged to it.

On the forty-first night a boat came round the point with no sail, only a man lying in its bottom, alive, with the same bands and triangles running across his shoulder that my mother had been knotting into the cord, as if the sea had been copying her. He said he had dreamed the pattern and woken with it already on him. None of us had taught him a single line. My mother took the cord from her neck and counted the knots twice to be sure.

She never told me whether the sea gave him back or he simply walked up the beach on his own legs. She only said that when you reach the last dot on a cord, you tie one more, though no one has asked you to, and the knot holds the place for whoever is still watching from the step.