Tribal black ink sleeve on shoulder and arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A man's shoulder and upper arm are covered by a large tribal-style tattoo made of thick black bands, chevrons, triangles and fine dotted and lined borders. The linework is crisp and the solid black areas give strong contrast against the skin. The design wraps over the shoulder and down the upper arm, with the photo taken in profile against a dark stone wall and wooden panels.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Tribal pattern Chevron Triangle Stripe Sleeve

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 fog came off the water at Callow Quay the morning the Brightwater failed to round the breakwater, and by noon the harbour women had gathered on the steps with their shawls pulled tight. Nobody said the word drowned. They said the sea was counting, the way it counted every hull that went out past the light.

Keep reading

Old Mercy Tull kept the sail loft at the top of the quay. Her grandmother had brought a set of patterns over the water in a salt-stained tin, and Mercy stitched them into every sail she made. Bands for the swell, she told her apprentice, Wren Hallam. Triangles for the teeth of the reef. Chevrons where the water turns back on itself. Sew the pattern close, she said, and the sea will know whose boat it is and think twice before it takes it.

The Brightwater's sail had carried that pattern for six seasons, though the boy at its tiller, Tobias Greer, had only ever wanted to fish past the reef where the big ones fed. Wren had pleaded with Mercy to let him go with his uncle's crew, and Mercy had given in on one condition: the pattern was fresh stitched, every band of it, the week before he sailed.

At dusk the boat came round the light under a patched and tattered sail. Its stitched bands showed dark against the grey, and the women on the steps counted the hull in and went home without speaking. Wren stayed behind in the loft, unpicking a loose thread from the sail's edge. Under it, where the chevrons met, she found a single word her grandmother had worked in as a joke: count. The sea had kept its tally, and it had come out even.