Black tribal tattoo of bands, zigzags and triangles covering a forearm, shown with coffee cups and a paper bag on a pavement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal band tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A bare forearm, covered from the top of the frame down to the elbow area, carries a dense band pattern of black zigzags, triangles, dots and solid stripes in a tribal style. The linework is bold and even, with solid black fills, and the skin shows no colour ink. The arm rests across a pair of bare, crossed legs beside two takeaway coffee cups and a paper bag on a grey surface.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Tribal Zigzag Triangle Band Geometric pattern Arm Coffee cup

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 winter the river froze to the bottom of the mill race, Aldous Pennock's grandmother cut the bands into her own forearm with a bone needle and a pot of soot, one row at a time, while the hens sulked under the stairs. She said the pattern was a map of the fields as they would be in spring, the zigzags for the ploughed furrows, the triangles for the stooks, the solid stripes for the hedges that would hold the frost off the barley. Aldous thought it was nonsense until the thaw came early and the water rose over the lower meadow exactly where the dots had shown it would.

Keep reading

He carried the story down to the village in February, when the carters were idle and the inn was full of men with nothing to do but argue. Old Hesketh laughed and said a man could draw any pattern he liked on a sleeve and call it weather. Aldous said nothing. He rolled up his own sleeve, held out his arm to the fire, and let Hesketh trace the bands with a grubby finger, one after another, until the fingertip reached the wrist and stopped.

They walked out at dusk to check the sluice. The lower meadow was dry as a bone under a skin of new ice, and the water was standing well back from the hedge. Hesketh looked at the stripes on Aldous's arm, then at the field, and said nothing at all, which in that parish was as close to an apology as anyone ever got.