Black tribal sleeve tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, with bold geometric bands, chevrons and solid black blocks in a Polynesian-inspired style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal shoulder and upper arm sleeve

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm of a bare-skinned person, shown in a side view against a dark background. It is built from bold, solid black bands alternating with fine outlined geometric panels, chevrons, dotted rows and triangular motifs that wrap around the arm. The image is in black and grey only, with clear, even linework and good contrast across the whole design.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Tribal Chevron Geometric pattern Sleeve Band Dotted line

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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

The adze had been my father's, and his father's before that, and Tui never once asked me to sharpen it, which is how I knew he meant to do it himself. We sat on the upturned hull at the top of the slip, the reef pale beyond the harbour mouth, and he talked about the bands. Black, he said, is the part of the sea you cannot see into. The fine lines between them are the scales of the fish that swim under it, counted one by one by people who had nothing better to do with their evenings.

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I asked him what the chevrons were. Arrows, he said, pointing the way the canoe should go when the wind turned. Then he tapped the dotted rows that ran along the outer edge like stitches. Those are the days. Each dot is a day a man was out past the reef and came home. He had a great many dots already, and I told him so, and he laughed the way he did when he had won an argument he had not yet started.

The next morning the swell came in grey and heavy, the kind that makes the boats strain on their ropes. Tui went out alone, and I stood on the slip with the adze in my hands and counted the dots as the sail went under the headland. I kept counting after I could no longer see the mast. When the light went I was still at it, and I have been counting ever since, though I stopped at a number I will not say aloud.