Black blackwork tribal sleeve tattoo covering a man's shoulder, upper chest and upper arm, with swirls, triangles and dotted bands.

Tribal sleeve across shoulder and upper arm

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless torso and arm show a large tribal-style tattoo spanning the shoulder, upper chest and upper arm. The design uses bold black linework with solid fills, swirling curves, rows of triangles and bands of dots. The ink is entirely black and grey on skin, and the pattern wraps around the arm in a flowing composition.

Blackwork Shoulder Upper arm Chest Tribal Swirl Triangle Dot Pattern

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

Sit down, sit down, the lift's broken again, so you'll hear this the slow way, all nineteen floors of it. Mind the stairwell smell. My uncle used to say the building breathes out the same damp every evening, and that's how you know it's still alive.

Keep reading

Long before this block stood on the hill above the harbour, there was an old octopus who lived under the breakwater at Kaiti. Her skin was black as wet tar, and a ring of pale dots ran down every arm, as if someone had pressed a thumb into her a thousand times. Fishermen left her crab shells on the steps and she left them nothing back. Except one boy, Sefa, who went down at low tide with a torch and a tin of sardines and sat with her until the water came up over his knees.

One winter the sea took his father's boat, and the council took the harbour cottages to build this tower. Sefa moved up here with a bag and no torch. The night he couldn't sleep, he heard suckers knocking at the window, slow and patient, one after another, climbing the outside wall from the car park. He opened the glass and a grey arm came over the sill, cold as a wet rope, and curled round his shoulder the way a tide comes over a rock. It did not pull. It only stayed, the way she had always stayed. When the light came, he found the pattern had sunk into him, swirls and triangles and a row of dots running down to his wrist, and after that he always found his way home by counting them.