Black tribal-style bands with spiral details and a central five-petalled flower tattoo wrapping across the side of a torso above the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal bands with a flower on the side

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black tattoo of bold tribal bands curves across the side and back of a torso, with a large five-petalled flower at the centre. Thinner spiral and scroll linework sits between the solid black bands, which tapers toward the lower back. The ink is entirely black, and the photograph is taken indoors in a warm-toned room against a patterned background.

Blackwork Ribs Flower Plumeria Spiral Scroll

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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 by the stove, all of you, and mind the kettle, because this is a long one and the cook isn't paying for the coal twice. Forty years back, when this ship still smelled of copra and not diesel, there was a tattooist on Teva Reef called Meleana Tui who worked by lamplight with a bone comb and soot ink. She set her bands around a man's side and back the way the tide draws lines on wet sand, one curve folding into the next, and she never drew the same line twice.

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Between the thick black bands she ran thin spirals like water going round a rock. In the middle she set a five-petalled flower, the frangipani that grew by her well, and she told him it would stay closed until he was far from home, then open so he'd know which way to turn. He laughed, signed on to the Pelagia as a net hauler, and forgot about it for a good while.

Then the squall took our mainsail off the reef, and we drifted three weeks with no stars and the water going green in the casks. The skipper was ready to give up on the compass. But the young navigator, a girl who'd learned the swells from her grandfather, kept rubbing her thumb along the spirals on that hauler's back where he lay sleeping in the shade. She said the lines were the swell, that the ocean keeps the same rhythm wherever you are, and if you follow the pattern long enough it leads you back to the place it began.

We followed the curves. On the twenty-second morning the flower on his side had opened in the heat, and the lookout swore it was the first real colour any of us had seen in days. Land came up grey and then green. Tui is long dead, and the hauler too, but the girl still keeps the frangipani pressed in a tin by the spice rack. Pass me that ladle, Joe. The stew's catching.