Black tribal sleeve tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm, with spirals, triangles and bold curved bands.

Tribal blackwork sleeve on shoulder and upper arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tribal design wraps across the shoulder and down the upper arm of a person whose face is not shown. Solid black bands with triangular and sawtooth edges curve around two spirals and a sun-like motif. The work uses black ink only, shown against the skin tone and a dark, partly visible background.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Spiral Triangle Tribal pattern Band

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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 lift at Hollin Court had been dead since Tuesday, so I was halfway up the stairwell with a bucket of white emulsion when I found the drawing on the landing wall between the sixth and seventh floors. Somebody had gone at it with a biro and a ruler, then again with a marker pen gone grey at the edges, until a whole sleeve of pattern ran up the plaster: a ring of sawtooth points, a sun with its rays bitten short, and two spirals curling in on each other like something asleep.

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I knew it was Jordan Pike's before I knew anything else. He lives on the eleventh with his nan and a dog that barks at the bin men, and he has drawn on every flat surface in the block since his school stopped giving him anything to draw on. I stood there with the brush dripping onto my shoe and counted the triangles. Forty-one along the outer band, the inner row stepping down to meet them, and not one of them out by a hair. Whoever taught him to measure like that had taught him to look, which is more than the council ever managed.

I should have painted it over. That is the job, and the lads from the housing office would have had it gone by dinner. Instead I put the lid back on the tin and sat on the bottom step with my knees cracking, looking at the sun and thinking about my dad's forearm, the blue ink gone soft as an old bruise, which he never showed anyone and never once explained.

The next morning there was a second drawing underneath, smaller and shakier, a spiral with one arm longer than the other. Beside it, in capitals pressed so hard the biro had torn the plaster, someone had written DONT PAINT OVER. I left the tin where it was. The lift was still broken, so I took the stairs, one hand on the cold rail, counting the landings the way he had counted the triangles, and for the first time in eleven years I did not hurry.