Black and grey shaded tribal mask tattoo with beaded trim on the upper arm of a person wearing a white top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal mask tattoo on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large carved-style tribal mask with heavy eyes, a flat nose and a lined mouth fills the centre of the upper arm, with a band of beads or dots curving along its top edge. The linework is fine and the shading is smooth, building depth across the face and the surrounding stone-like texture. The image is in black and grey ink on warm skin tones, with the arm cropped and a white sleeve at the top right.

Upper arm Mask Bead Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mask hung over the stove in the cabin of the Marigold, a narrow boat that carried coal and cut timber up and down the Trent, and nobody aboard would say who had carved it. Old Edwin Tallis, who had the barge from his father, said it had come up out of the hold with a load of Mersey sand, wrapped in sacking, and that the eyes were heavy because the thing was tired of watching.

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The river had been bad that year. Two lock-keepers had gone in at Torksey, and the ice came early. Edwin's granddaughter Ruth, who was nine and did not believe in anything she could not dip in a bucket, took the mask down one night to look for a maker's mark. She found a string of dried seeds knotted round its neck, forty-one of them, one for each bargeman drowned on that stretch since the old king's time, and a bare length of cord left for a forty-second.

She did not sleep. At first light the mist sat on the water like wool, and she saw the mask's lids had lifted a finger's width. Edwin came up the steps with the kettle and found her on the deck with the seeds in her lap. 'It wants paying,' he said, not surprised. 'Or it wants telling. I never could remember which.'

She tied one of her own milk teeth onto the cord, a bead to match the row along its brow, and the eyes closed again. Edwin never said whether that was the right payment. The Marigold reached Gainsborough that week with no one lost, and Ruth kept the knot in her coat pocket after that, worrying it between her fingers at every lock.