Black tattoos of spirals and tribal-style motifs cover a forearm and the back of a hand, with small dot-and-circle designs on the fingers.

Spiral and tribal patterns on a hand and forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Close view of a forearm and hand covered in repeated spiral and scroll motifs, outlined and filled in dark ink. The back of the hand carries a larger tribal-style pattern of curling blades, while the fingers each show a small circle with dots. The ink is solid black and grey against warm skin, with a dark background and soft focus toward the upper right.

Forearm Hand Spiral Scroll Tribal pattern Dot Circle Finger Hand Forearm

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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 down, sit down, the kettle's only just gone off. You'll want to hear about the eddy below Ashby Lock before the water takes the light off the far bank. My grandfather worked the narrowboat Mercy Jane for forty years, and he told it to me the way I'm telling it to you, thumb going round and round on the tiller brass.

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There was a whirlpool under the weir that year, a spiral of brown water that never once let go of anything it caught. Gulls went in and came up somewhere else, the old men said, or didn't come up at all. Thomas Pell, who carried slate for the Hadley yard, swore he'd go round it with a rope and a dog and nothing more. So he tied his tail line to a willow, took a bottle of rum, and rowed out at first light with the sun cutting over the reeds like a blade.

He came back at dusk with no rum, no dog, and a fistful of grey pebbles he'd fished out of the silt. He set them in a row on the cabin table, nine of them, each with a little dot scratched into its face. The water's a letter, he said, written the same way over and over, curl inside curl, until somebody sits still long enough to read it. Then he went to bed and never said another word about it, not for the rest of his life.

So when you go past that weir tomorrow, look down at the water and watch the little curls it makes, one folding into the next. That's the handwriting. Don't row in after it.