Blackwork tattoo on a raised forearm and upper arm, with solid black bands broken by two thin unpigmented stripes, and a fine ornamental tattoo visible on the shoulder.

Solid black arm bands with two thin stripes

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised arm shows solid black ink covering the forearm and upper arm, with two thin pale stripes cutting across the forearm band. The ink is dense and uniform, giving a bold graphic effect against the pale wall behind. A fine ornamental tattoo with delicate linework is partly visible on the upper chest or shoulder at the lower right of the frame.

Blackwork Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Stripe Ornament Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Skarra Haven dyed a wedding sleeve black in those days, not unless they wanted the whole harbour talking, and Aud Merrin wanted no such thing. But old Tobias Vell came up the cliff path with a bolt of wool under his arm and a look on his face like a man selling his own boat. The sleeve had to be black as the inside of a kettle, he said, black enough that no lamplight would show through.

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She ran the cloth through the iron and the oak galls for three days, stirring with a paddle worn pale at the handle. On the third night she bound the sleeve at two places with waxed twine, the way you'd bind a rope to keep its strands from fraying, and dipped it once more. When she lifted it out, the twine had kept the dye back in two thin bands, and the wool there stayed the colour of oat straw.

Vell laughed and asked her to put it right. Aud said she would not. The twine was tied where his son's boat had gone down in the March gale, and she had sat up with the boy's mother on the wet stones while the men searched the rocks. Tobias had not known she knew. He stood in the steam a long while, then said the pale lines were the rope and the black was the sea, and he would take it as it was.

On the morning of the wedding the groom lifted his arm in the chapel doorway so the grey light came through the wool. Two pale threads showed across his forearm, and the whole room went quiet, because every soul there knew which rope had been pulled from which water.