Black and grey tribal S tattoo on an upper arm, shaded to look as if it is breaking through cracked skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal S with cracked skin on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold tribal S-shaped motif sits on the upper arm, with its sharp, flowing black forms standing out against the skin. Heavy black shading and fine grey highlights give the design a raised, three-dimensional look, and radiating cracks around it suggest skin splitting open. The image is cropped close on the arm with a plain, dark background and a white top at the edge of the frame.

Blackwork Upper arm Tribal

Find an artist for this

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

The sea gets into the galley before anything else does. By the third day out of Hull the kettle has learned to walk across the hob, and you have stopped fighting it, wedging the tea towels under the rail with a tin of rice and a wooden spoon. Ernie Coyle, who cooked on the Constance Ray for thirty-one years, left you a crack in the port bulkhead behind the steel sink. It runs from the deckhead down to the drip tray in a long, unhurried S, the paint lifted at its edges like old peeling varnish.

Keep reading

The first time the trawler rolled hard off Shetland, the crack opened a finger's width and let in a jet of black seawater that hit the stock pot. You filled it with the grey putty the bosun swore was against regulations, and you smoothed it with your thumb until the paint looked innocent. Next morning it was back, a little longer, curling round the rivet heads as if the ship had been drawing with it in its sleep.

Ernie's log, tucked behind the spice rack, had one line for every trip: Bulkhead holding. Beneath the last entry he had drawn the same S, shaded in pencil until the paper shone, and written under it, Let it talk. You thought he was daft until a night in the Denmark Strait, when the whole galley groaned, the pans swung in a long arc, and the crack opened and closed like a mouth taking breath.

You stopped filling it after that. You cook the Sunday roast with the S at your shoulder, slice bread against its curve, and when the seas come up you listen for the sound it makes. Somewhere under the steel the ship is still shifting its weight, and you find, to your surprise, that you know the rhythm of it now.