Black blackwork tribal tattoo with koru-style spirals across the top of a foot and ankle, photographed against a dark background.

Tribal spiral design across the top of a foot

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black tribal design of curling spirals and angular bands covers the top of the foot and rises towards the ankle, with the toes visible below. The solid black linework is filled with fine hatched and dotted patterns that create tonal variation across the bands. The tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones against a dark backdrop, with the skin lit from above.

Blackwork Other Spiral Tribal Swirl Foot

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

Nan wanted the koru on the cake and nothing else, so I spent the morning on a stepladder in the marquee pressing sugar fern fronds onto three tiers while the caterers argued over the trestles. Every frond had to curl inward at the tip, the way the new ones do when they first push up through the bush. My cousin Hemi had sketched the pattern on a paper napkin the night before, and it was a tangle of loops that refused to close until he pulled up a chair beside me, took the pen, and showed me how the spiral starts from one stem and folds back on itself, with the bands running off it like water off a roof.

Keep reading

The groom's side arrived at half past two in a convoy of hatchbacks. His grandfather walked straight past the drinks table to the cake and stood in front of it with his hands behind his back. He said nothing for a long time. Then he pointed at the angular bands down the side of the bottom tier, the ones with the tiny hatched teeth, and then at the ring cushion on the table, and laughed until he had to sit down on an upturned crate.

When he had his breath back he told me the spiral was not meant to be looked at from outside. You keep the middle, he said, the tight bit where it goes back to the start, and everything else unrolls from it. I thought he meant the cake. He meant the family, or maybe the marriage, and I didn't ask which.

We cut the first slice from the centre, where the curl closes tightest, and nobody complained when the icing broke into dark crumbs along the edge of the knife.