Large black tribal tattoo covering a man's shoulder, upper arm and part of his chest, with bold swirls and geometric bands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal shoulder, arm and chest tattoo

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A bare-chested man shows a large tribal tattoo covering his shoulder, upper arm and part of his chest. The design uses bold solid black shapes, swirling motifs and geometric bands, with areas of bare skin showing between them. The pattern wraps around the arm and across the upper body, and no colour ink is used.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Chest Tribal pattern Swirl Geometric pattern Band

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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

Your mother says you have stopped answering the telephone, so I am writing this on the back of the wedding order, which is the only paper left in the house that your uncle has not filled with sums.

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The pattern for the groom's family is finished. I cut the stencil from the old banana leaf sheet your grandfather kept under the stairs, the one with the turtle eye at the centre of each band. Tell the young man the swirls are meant to turn the way the tide turns in the lagoon at Ruby Point, clockwise on the left and back again on the right, so that nobody can say where one band ends and the next begins.

On the morning of the wedding, old Sefo came up the hill with his tapping kit in a biscuit tin and worked for four hours while the whole village sang in the next room. He stopped only when the black went dark enough to hold. I watched the bands fill and thought of the hull lines your grandfather chalked on the slipway, how he never trusted a curve he could not follow with one finger.

The strange part is that the bride asked for the gaps to be left bare, a little clean skin between each band, so that the sun could reach through. Sefo laughed and said that was the only honest way to wear a pattern. Come home for the next one, and bring the good scissors. I will leave the tin on the step.