Black tribal patterned tattoo covering a man's chest, shoulder, upper arm and ribs, with bold swirls and geometric shapes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal patterned chest, shoulder and arm tattoo

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man's torso and upper arm are covered in a large tribal patterned tattoo. Bold black linework forms swirls, spirals and symmetrical geometric panels that wrap across the chest, shoulder, upper arm and down the side of the ribs. The design is entirely black ink with solid fills and shading, set against plain skin and a tiled background.

Blackwork Chest Shoulder Upper arm Ribs Tribal pattern Swirl Spiral Geometric shape Chevron Sleeve Chest piece Man

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The swell came in from the north-east at the turn of the tide, and Hine Tauhia stood on the sand with a palm-leaf rib in one hand and watched it roll under the reef. "Three long, then a short," she told her nephew. "Count them, then draw them, or the sea will count you."

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Rangi drew badly. His lines wobbled across the bark like crabs that had been drinking. She took the stick from him and cut the swells as spirals, tight where the water folded over the shallows and wide where it ran clear to the drop-off. Chevrons went in for the ripples that bent back on themselves, and a solid black square for the shadow the reef threw at noon. By evening the bark looked like a turtle's back that someone had stitched shut.

Rangi carried it out to the double canoe that would lead the fishing fleet through the gap. He lashed the bark inside the hull, where he could feel the pattern through the wood with his palm. On the third morning the wind backed round to the west, the water went flat and strange, and the boats came through the channel with the spirals running ahead of them, exactly where she had cut them.

When the fleet came home with full nets, Hine asked him what he had felt through the wood. He said the sea had been quiet, but only because someone had already read it. She pressed the palm-leaf rib into his hand and went back up the beach without looking round. "Now you count them," she said.