Black and grey tribal swirl tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm, with a hand resting on the chest against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swirling tribal sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo of interlocking tribal swirls and curved bands covers the shoulder and upper arm. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading that gives the forms depth and a rounded, raised look. The image is a close, side-on shot against a dark background, with the person's torso and one hand visible and no face shown.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Swirl Tribal Spiral Sleeve Curve

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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 nearer the fire, the lot of you, and mind your ale, because this is a tale about the wind and I'll not have it blow out my candle halfway through.

Keep reading

Back when the beech wood still came right down to the mill race, there lived a widow called Agnes Thorne who kept bees and no goats, which the parish thought peculiar. Every autumn the wind came up off the water and went through the trees like a dog through stubble, tearing at the thatch and making the bell rope sing at night. Agnes got tired of it. So one wet November she sat on her step with a skein of undyed wool and began to knot.

She knotted the wind the way you'd tie a ewe to a post. Round and round she went, over the bridge rail and under the lych gate, curling the thread into shapes like the rings on a pond when a stone goes in, and every loop she pulled tight, the gusts grew sulkier and smaller. By Candlemas the wind was no more than a breath in the hedges, and the church was so quiet you could hear the mice argue.

But the wind had a memory, and it remembered the pattern. Now, if you walk the lane past the mill at dusk, you'll see the hawthorn bending in long curls, and the willows hanging their twigs in spirals, and the wind creeping out to trace them over and over, as if it is still trying to pick the knot loose. Agnes has been in the churchyard these hundred years. The bees are gone. The knots are not.