Black tribal blackwork half sleeve with bold geometric bands covering the upper arm and shoulder of a person wearing a white vest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal half sleeve on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design covers the upper arm and shoulder, built from solid geometric bands, triangular points and fine patterned fills. The work is shaded in black ink on skin with no colour. The arm is shown close up against a dark background and a white vest, with the design curving around the shoulder.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Tribal Geometric pattern Band Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's daughter cut the sun into the lintel stone the winter her father's eyes began to fail. She worked with a chisel and a borrowed mallet, cutting in bands so the salt weather could not wear them flat, and each triangle was a little sharper than the last. Her father could no longer see the rays, but he could feel them with his thumb when he came up the stairs at dusk.

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The fog came in from the west that autumn, and three boats went onto the Teeth before the Sunday. The lamp was bright enough, but it threw a single round beam, and the fishermen said a beam was no use to a man who did not know which way he faced. The girl sat on the gallery rail for three nights working it out. Then she saw that when the low lamp slanted across the wet stone, the carved rays threw their shadows exactly where the reef lay.

She took the lamp down, shimmed the lens by a finger's width, and set the great glass so its beam swept outward along the points of the carving. Each point had a rock behind it, and each band rang true to a bearing. She wrote the numbers on the back of her father's hand in ink, because his eyes could not read them but his hand still could.

On the fourth morning a crew came round the point with the tide high and the sky clean. They saw a sun cut in grey stone and a light turning to meet them. Their skipper asked who had carved it. The keeper's daughter, her father said, and she has been up on the rail since the night the fog came, and she is asleep now, so you will have to row quietly.