Black tribal-style tattoo covering the chest, shoulder and upper arm, with a greyscale realistic panel of stars and a figure on the upper arm and a geometric band on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal chest, shoulder and arm sleeve

Geometric · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a bare upper body with a large sleeve tattoo. Bold black tribal-style patterns with geometric motifs, triangles and curved bands cover the chest and shoulder, while the upper arm has a greyscale shaded panel with stars and a figure. A patterned band continues down the forearm, and the image is framed tightly on the torso and arm.

Geometric Blackwork Chest Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Tribal pattern Geometric pattern Star Figure Sleeve Chest piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the boat came in on the morning tide, and your uncle Alec stepped onto the slipway like a man who had borrowed his own face from somebody kinder. Mam cried before he had got his bag off his shoulder. Dad only nodded and went to check the lamp oil, which is his way of saying the same thing.

Keep reading

The ink is the first thing you notice, even in the grey light of the kitchen. Black bands run across his chest and over the shoulders in stepped curves, with triangles set between them like teeth, and a row of stars climbs the upper arm beside a heron that seems to be stepping out of the sea. Below the elbow the pattern tightens into a ring of small diamonds that goes round and round the wrist. He says an old navigator drew it onto him over eleven nights in a harbour town I could not pronounce, and that the man taught him the sky is read in rings, not lines, so you always know where the centre is.

Last night the wind dropped and I took him up the tower with the flask. He sat on the gallery rail with his sleeve pushed back and counted the stars by touching one finger to each point, lips moving. Then he pointed out over the water, where the swell rolled in long dark bands, and said the pattern was only the sea written down by people who had spent their lives on it. I asked whether the lamp could read it too. He laughed and said the lamp had been reading it for a hundred years.

When the beam came round I copied the triangles into the back of the logbook, next to the tide times, because it seemed the proper place for them. Alec's hand was steadier than mine. The light swept across the page and out over the water, and the pattern stayed where we had put it.