Black tribal tattoo covering a man's left shoulder, chest and upper arm down to the forearm, with spirals, zigzags and a central face-like motif.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal shoulder, chest and arm sleeve

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man shows a large black tribal tattoo covering his shoulder, upper chest and arm, continuing down to the forearm. The bold, solid black linework forms spirals, zigzags, diamonds and a central face-like motif on the chest, with dense fill in the darker areas. The image is black and grey, shot indoors against a dark background, with the head cropped out of frame.

Blackwork Shoulder Chest Upper arm Forearm Tribal Spiral Zigzag Geometric pattern Sleeve Chest piece

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 lines had to close before the tide turned, Oru told the girl, because a spiral left open is a door, and the sea walks through doors. She was twelve and had been sent to hold the lamp while he inked the Ashen Wall mark on the boatmen's shoulders, the way his grandfather had. Every curl began at the heart and wound outward, he said, so the water could find its way in and find its way back out again.

Keep reading

The men who came to him that autumn wanted the Listener, the mask with shut eyes and a zigzag jaw that the old fishers said kept watch over the harbour. Oru cut it with a bone needle and soot ink, and each night he fed a little of the leftover ink to the fire so none of it could be carried to another village. The girl asked why, once, and he said the Listener was not sleeping. It was waiting for a debt to be paid.

In the third winter a boatman called Hale refused to pay, and the storm that came off the north ridge took his boat and nothing else. Oru walked the shingle the next morning with the lamp still unlit in his hand. He found an oar, then a net, and later the boatman himself, his spirals still closed and his face turned up to the grey sky as though it had been expecting the tide all along.

The girl kept the lamp after that. She learned to close every line, and when a man came asking for work she first asked him what he owed the water. On her last day of work that winter she pressed the needle to the first curl, followed it from the heart outward, and left the final turn open by the width of a hair, so the sea would have somewhere to go home.