Black and white line drawing of six labelled arms and hands, lettered a to f, each covered in geometric bands, chevrons and triangles on the forearm and hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six arm and hand tattoo patterns in line drawing

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A black and white line drawing of six pairs of arms and hands, labelled a to f under the caption Figure 45, Arm and hand tattooing. Each arm carries a different arrangement of horizontal stripes, chevrons, triangles, small arrow and tree-like motifs, and the hands show dotted and patterned bands across the backs and fingers. The drawing is in clean ink outline with no colour, set on a plain paper background.

Geometric Forearm Hand Stripe Chevron Triangle Arrow Arm Hand Line drawing Pattern

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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, you are letting the cold in through the door, and I will not tell this to a draught. Put your arm across my knee. No, the other one, the one the sea has not yet bitten. Now look at these lines. They are the rains of the year we lost the boat on the reef at Ossun Point. Count them with me. One, two, three, four. Every stripe is a rain that came and went while your great-grandmother waited on the shingle with her hands folded in her lap.

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The chevrons are nets. My mother's mother knotted nets like that, so tight that a crab could not find the gap. The little triangles along the wrist are the teeth of the reef, and the arrows above them are the gulls that flew off the cliff when the wind turned, heading north where nobody could follow. Each household drew its own counting on the skin, and anyone who did not know the counting could not read it. That was the point of it.

Your uncle Pelu had dots across the back of his hand, a band of them, one for each son who went out and did not come back. He wanted the whole thing done in a single night, so the pain would finish before the tide did. The artist was tired and asked if he could skip a few. Pelu said no, and counted every one aloud until the lamp burned low.

He never filled the last stripe on his forearm. He said that space belonged to whoever came back to count it. So look here, at the bare skin above your wrist. That is yours to decide, and I will not be the one who tells you what it should say.