A gloved hand holds a tattoo machine needle tip against skin, working on flowing black and red swirling linework on a fresh tattoo.

Red and black swirl linework being tattooed

Other · Mixed · Photo

A gloved hand holds a tattoo machine tip against the skin while working on a design of sweeping, flowing lines. The linework is dark and the red lines are laid beside it, creating curved swirls that run diagonally across the frame. The shallow focus keeps the needle and the nearest section of the design sharp while the rest of the skin softens.

Other Tattoo machine Needle Swirl Linework

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

The river at Haddon Ford ran red the spring the old ferryman's daughter was to be married, for the clay banks had been cut by the flood and the water carried it down in long curling ribbons. Nell Tarrant had watched it from the landing every morning since Candlemas, and she said to anyone who would listen that the river was writing something and no one was reading it. Her mother told her to hush and mind the ropes.

Keep reading

On the morning of the wedding the ferryman, Abel Crane, found the bride sitting on the bottom step with her sleeve pushed up and a stick of charcoal in her fingers. She had drawn a line along her forearm from wrist to elbow, and then another beside it, dark and then red, and the lines went round and back on themselves the way the current went round the piers. Abel asked her what she was doing. She said she was getting the river to sit still long enough to be copied.

The groom came down the lane at ten with his hat in his hand, and the bride held out her arm and asked him to trace the swirls with his finger so she would know the path when she came to the water. He did, slowly, and when he reached the bend near her wrist he stopped, because the lines had gone on past where his finger could follow, down into the wet clay of the bank where the river had carved its own.

They were married at noon. When Nell came home that evening, her mother saw the red still on her arm and asked whether it would wash off. Nell said it would not, and that the river had kept the other half.