Black and grey tribal blackwork sleeve tattoo covering the shoulder, upper arm and forearm, with a geometric mandala on the shoulder and a chest piece.

Tribal blackwork sleeve on a man's arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man, cropped below the head, shows a full arm sleeve of black tribal ornament. A radial mandala covers the shoulder, bands of spirals and chevrons run down the upper arm, and a smaller mandala sits above the elbow on the forearm. The solid black lines are filled with fine dotwork shading and the piece is in black and grey ink, set against a dark background.

Blackwork Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Chest Mandala Tribal Spiral Chevron Geometric pattern Sleeve Arm

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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, the lot of you, and mind the gravy on the rug. Mrs Pollard only lights the fire for stories, so you'll have to earn your toast. This one is about Tobias Crane, who came down to Brightwell in the winter of nineteen-oh-four with a leather roll of needles and a tin of ink the colour of a chimney. He took the back room over the boot shop and hung a card in the window that said only: Lines Done Here.

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The fishermen came first, then the herring girls, then the young men who had been in fights at the Crown. Tobias asked for nothing but patience and that they sit still while the needle went. He drew with a compass and a ruler at first, then by hand, because he said the sea never made a straight line and neither should a man's arm. Spirals were his favourite, the way the tide turns back on itself in the rock pools. Then chevrons, like the wake behind a boat that has finished with the water.

One November a lad named Ezra Vane walked in with a mother who would not look at the sea. He wanted the whole arm done in black. Tobias worked eleven nights by the light of a paraffin lamp, dotting shade into the solid lines until they seemed to breathe. On the last night Ezra held his arm up to the window and the lamp caught the round design above the elbow. Tobias said it was the sun sitting at the centre of the tide, and a man could carry the sun with him wherever the boats went.

Ezra sailed out the next morning on the Margaret Ann and never came back, and his mother sat in her front room every night after, turning her own wedding ring. Tobias shut the shop and went north. The card is still in the boot shop window, and if you look under the paint you will find the spirals going round, the same as the water does. Now pass the salt, and somebody put another log on, for the tide is turning.