Black line drawing of a woman's face with dot and line markings on the forehead, cheeks and chin, surrounded by tribal-style arrow, tree and triangle motifs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal facial markings with motif sheet

Other · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a woman's face in the centre, with small dot and cross markings on the forehead, cheeks and chin. Surrounding it are rows of tribal-style motifs, including arrow-like forms, triangles, branching shapes and stacked chevrons, drawn in solid black and fine line. The image is black and white and arranged like a reference sheet of designs around the face.

Other Face Arrow Triangle Dot Line drawing Chevron

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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

Hasna's mother had marked the Long Road with a chisel and a tin of lime, and her mother before her. Where the sand ran white and the wind wiped out the tracks, a traveller needed a sign that would survive a month of gusts. So each mark was a shape that meant something: an arrow pointing toward water, a stack of chevrons for a day's walk, a branching shape for a fork where the camels could choose shade or sun.

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One spring a salt merchant named Yusra Benhamou came up from the coast with twelve mules and a boy who could not yet read. He laughed at the stones. "Rock does not know where it is going," he said, and he took the arrow pointing to the cistern and reasoned that the cistern must lie behind him, so he walked with the sign at his back. Hasna warned him that the cut was deep and that the arrow was there for a reason. He did not believe her.

The mules walked three days east into the flats. On the fourth, the boy found the bleached ribs of a mule in a dry wadi, and the merchant understood that the marks had been right all along, only read from the wrong side. He walked back with an empty water skin and his pride folded under his shawl, and he stood before the stone until the sun dropped behind it.

Now the caravans slow at the first chevron when the wind comes up off the flats. The drivers count their steps aloud, and the stone keeps the count with them.