Black and grey photograph of a blackwork tribal band tattoo with bold triangles on a man's forearm, above a black wristband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal band tattoo on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a band of solid black tribal-style pattern wrapping around the outer forearm, with large filled triangles flanked by bordered bands of smaller geometric motifs. The linework is bold and the black fills are dense and even, with the design ending in a clean edge just above the wrist. The image is monochrome with a soft vignette, and the man's hand and loose sleeve sit at the edge of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Tribal Triangle Geometric pattern Band Armband

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mattias Brenn was still tarring the seams of the punt when his brother came down the slip shouting that the Gull had gone over on the Teeth, the sandbar off Crane Bay, and that Hal was under her keel with his foot caught in the net. Mattias dropped the pot. The tar ran into the shingle and set there like a black stain on the stones.

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The old crews in Crane Bay marked themselves before they went out. A man took a needle and a pot of lamp soot and worked a band round the outer forearm, bordered top and bottom with rope-lines, the space between filled with triangles pointed like the teeth of a dogfish. Nan Sorrel at the chandlery said the teeth were the whole point. The sea was hungry and would take the first soft thing it saw, so you gave it something hard to chew, and then it let the rest of you go about your business. Nobody under sixty in Crane Bay had seen it done. Mattias had learned it from a book with water-stained pages, and his hand had never been steady.

He worked on Hal's arm in the back room of the net loft while the wind rattled the shutters. The needle slipped twice. The triangles came out uneven, two of them larger than the rest, and he swore and left them, because there was no time to be neat. He ended the band a finger's width above the wrist, where the rope always sits, and wiped the blood away with his sleeve.

Hal went out on the afternoon tide in a borrowed boat. The Gull came up on the flood two days later with her mast gone and a stranger's dog asleep in the bows, and Hal at the tiller. The band had faded to a grey shadow by then, but the largest triangle still showed, pointing toward the wrist, the way a tooth points when the jaw is closing.