Black tribal-style band tattoo wrapping the inner forearm, with a shaded flower and swirling motifs, in black ink on skin.

Tribal band with flower on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink band wraps around the forearm, built from bold tribal-style swirls and solid blackwork shapes. A stippled, shaded flower with five petals sits on the upper edge of the band, with fine dots along the inner edge. The background is dark, which makes the grey shading and the skin tone stand out, and the band is framed centrally across the arm.

Dotwork Forearm Tribal Flower Plumeria Swirl Band Dot

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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

The cutting was the length of my finger and nobody on the Dundee boat thought it would take, so when the purser asked why I kept it in a jam jar on the galley table I told him it was ballast. It had come off a tree behind a harbour office in a place with a name I never learned to spell, wrapped in wet newspaper and tucked inside my oilskin. Three months at sea, through the Bay and the long grey stretch off Cape Wrath, and it kept its one green leaf. Every morning I checked the stem with my thumbnail, the way my father checked a rope for fraying, and every morning it stayed green.

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When we tied up in Leith in February, sleet coming sideways off the Forth, I carried the jar up the hill to Mrs Imrie's glasshouse. She had been growing orchids for the Edinburgh gentlemen since before the war and had no patience for sentiment. She turned the cutting over in her hands, sniffed the wound, and said, 'Plumeria. They'll not flower here. Too little sun.'

I told her I didn't need flowers, I needed to know it would live. She set it on the warm bench above the boiler pipes and we did not speak of it again that winter. In June a boy came down to the harbour office with a note, and I went up expecting leaves. Instead there were five white petals opening on a stub of bare wood, each one going cream at the edges, and the whole glasshouse smelt of a place I had never been.