Upper arm sleeve in a tribal-style blackwork design with bands of spirals and triangles, featuring two red flower motifs.

Tribal sleeve with red flowers on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A full upper arm sleeve of tribal-style pattern made from bold black spiral bands, triangular fills and interlocking curved lines. Two red flower motifs with layered petals sit within the design, and the rest of the ink is black and grey. The photo is a mirror selfie taken in a cluttered room, with a phone held in the other hand and the sleeve filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Tribal pattern Flower Spiral Sleeve Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the lot of you, and mind the tent pole. My great-grandmother's grandfather ran the Dunmore Travelling Fair with a steam organ and a wagon painted the colour of wet slate. In every town they came to, he'd scratch a spiral into the grass with a tent peg and say the fair would turn the way the spiral turned, inward first and then out again, and nobody could leave until it had finished its turn.

Keep reading

The year the rain came sideways across Cornwall, a girl called Ada Pell joined them with one trunk and a red ribbon. She could thread a needle in the dark, and she had a habit of drawing on the canvas flaps of the ride tents with a stub of charcoal: triangles in rows like teeth, bands that wound round each other like rope, and in the middle of every knot a flower with too many petals, dabbed in the same red paint they used on the carousel horses' lips.

Ada's work was the Wheel of Ribbons, the lightest job on the field, yet the ribbons kept snarling. Each evening she unwound them by lamplight, following each band from the outside in, and never once cut. Old Pell used to say that cutting was how a fair lost its way. When the Wheel jammed for the last time, in a gale that tore the bunting off the poles, she sat in the middle of the tangle and traced the curves with one finger until the knot gave, and the whole fair went silent to watch.

So when you walk the ground tomorrow and see those red blooms stamped on the ticket booths, don't pluck one. They're only there to show you where the turning began. Follow the bands out, and you'll find the gate.